Hello readers!  Anybody still there? Is this thing on???

Have you noticed I’ve gone a bit quiet lately?  I didn’t mean to.  We’re still friends; I swear.

The things is; I’ve stumbled upon this little thing called writers block.  I never really knew what it was, and I have definitely never experienced it before.  Probably because I have never actually been a writer before.  I do have a degree in English, but that led me to teaching, and then further down the road in education.  But a writer, I was not.

After hanging up my teaching hat I felt that I needed something to keep me busy.  I wanted a creative outlet and somewhere to share my ideas.  After a girls night in the South of France, and someone telling me I should start writing; I woke up the next morning, shook off my headache and opened my laptop.

I was going to become a blogger.

And blog I did.  I wrote about EVERYTHING…if you’ve been with me from the beginning, you know ‘everything’ means over-sharing about lady parts and the crazy things us girls experience(d) living life in France(click here if you don’t know what I’m talking about).  I started getting positive feedback about my story telling and as the ball started rolling, I landed myself on several internet sites.  Maybe I could write after all?  I joked about wanted to blog for The Huffington Post, become a travel writer, and maybe someday, in my wildest dreams, be in a book.  Before long, my jokes became a reality and my bookshelf was starting to have a small “Lisa Webb” section.

But I still never really felt like an author, because it never really felt like work.

When we lived in France, I would put my daughters down for an afternoon nap, open up my laptop and ideas would effortlessly flow out of me.  When I decided to try and write a novel/memoir, I managed to crank out 3/4 of a novel by spending a few weeks worth of nap times feverishly typing away.  A NOVEL!!!! That’s crazy when I think about it now.

Then we found out we were moving to Asia and I stopped working on the book because life had other plans for me.  The words still sit on my laptop.  They’re dusty, and I hope I’ll go back to them someday, but not right now.

Why? Because I haven’t been able to write a damn thing since we moved to Indonesia.

I wrote while we were in Canada this summer, and I wrote while we were in Bali in the fall, but from our new home, there is some strange phenomenon that has me at odds with the keyboard.  Our house is lovely, and I’m quite comfortable in it, but I open my laptop, the words that once flowed directly from my mind to my fingertips, seem to be stuck at a creative toll-booth without any change.

I have no rhyme or reason as to why.  Of course my husband has a theory.  Call it what you will—karma perhaps?  But one day in France he came home with this very ugly brown lazy boy recliner. What an eye sore it was! I asked him what he was thinking and swore I would never sit in it….until I started using it to nurse our second baby.  From that point on, it somehow became MY brown chair.  When the girls would be napping, I’d put on a fire, grab myself a Perrier(because France), flick up the foot rest, and the words would just start to flow from the comfort on the big, ugly, brown recliner.

“You can’t write because you’re missing your brown chair” was my husband’s tongue in cheek theory about my sudden lack of words.

The strange thing is that as soon as I leave the town we currently live in (like right now) the words come back with abundance.  I recently met an old friend in Singapore for a couple days and on my 1.5 hour flight, I wrote more than I had in the three months of living in my new home.  Same goes for the flight that I currently write this on.

So what’s going on? I don’t really know. I guess writers block really is a thing, and I guess I kinda have it—geographical location depending.  But I’m on vacation and the words are flowing, so I’m going to make the most of this while I can.  Whether you consider it candy or coal, my Christmas present to you is to write my little heart out on the down time I have over the Christmas holidays.

I’m hoping the new year brings back my love for the keyboard from the comforts of my new home.  But if not; I’ll see you on my next vacation.