Does my phone number have a “call me” sign taped to its back? Three telemarketers have interrupted me so far this evening since I sat down to work.
In other news, I have 678 words of a preface written. Most of them are good. I feel like I’m missing something meaningful, but most of my overbrain considers this a symptom of exhaustion.
Eating sugar does not help. The sugar rush bit doesn’t happen; the body and mind go directly to the sugar crash. Do not pass go; do not collect $200 worth of perky focus-on-work.
Feeling so tired that you can’t even manage a sugar high is a sad state to be in, let me tell you.
There is an astonishingly large amount of “you need this unused bit of electronic stuff that I have lying around, pay me a pittance when you have the money free in a couple of months” going around in my life right now. As a result, I have my first real grown-up stereo set-up after buying a CD deck as my treat to myself for delivering the pagan pregnancy book (how have I, a bass-loving cellist, survived listened to classical music without a subwoofer until now?), and as of last night I also have a replacement ’03 Latitude laptop for my well-loved and well-used ’94 Lifebook (interestingly enough, also a gift from a friend a five years ago). The Lifebook is too slow for me now, won’t recognise USB flash drives no matter how many drivers I download, only functions on dial-up, can’t read CD-Rs on which I store files, and is just not up to what I need it to do for me these days. It saw me through five books, two published and three unpublished, as well as plenty of articles and short fiction. The Latitude is pretty much equivalent to my own desktop, which is yay, because now I have an alternative place to go to work/play when I need to get away from where I’ve been working on the desktop in the office. I wonder what I’ll write on it first. Other than Swan Sister once I get back to it next week, that is.
So heartfelt thanks to those of my friends who think of me, and who believe that things like music machines and computers ought to be used instead of gathering dust.
And I perpetuate the passing-on karma: yes Mum, you get the Lifebook when we come down to see you this month.
Not only have two boxes of books just arrived, but my new issue of Fine Cooking was in the mailbox too. Life loves me today. Of course, the doorbell woke Liam, but as he’s only been napping for an hour and a quarter I’ll see if he falls asleep again.
I went to bed with my copy of Northanger Abbey around eight o’clock last night and was asleep by 9:30 once I’d finished it. Naturally this means I woke up at 4 AM, and after trying to go back to sleep for half an hour I got up and worked for an hour and a half. I puzzled out some of what needs to happen next in Swan Sister, worked out some world-stuff, and sketched out a scene or two, then went back to bed around six for a while. It was my own fault for allowing myself to fall asleep too early, but I was just so tired for some reason.
I received a manuscript to review and for which to write a preface today, due back in a week. I’m two chapters into it already, which pleases me because I want to be able to really think about the preface. Not knowing exactly when things like this will be sent to me means I have to make sure the rest of my projects are scheduled in a flexible fashion. I’m glad I got so much work done on the WynterGreene articles yesterday; it takes some of the pressure off that might otherwise have built up when this MS was sent to me, because it naturally takes priority over whatever else is on the go. Fortunately I was also clever enough to start these articles in plenty of time, too.
No, the boy’s not going back to sleep. In fact, he’s singing. Back to parenting.
I dusted off my personal altar today and rearranged things a bit. I updated my spellbox with new petitions and burned old ones that had seen fruition or pertained to events now concluded. I lit candles, purified with incense, and settled down to meditate. This is part of what I’m doing to keep in touch with the foundations of my practice.
One of the changes I want to make in my life involves dealing with how overwhelmed by spiritual administration I’ve been feeling. For the past six years I’ve written and taught and led and guided and it’s time to pull back from that to focus on reacquainting myself with my own personal spiritual practices once again. The energy I’ve been putting into supporting other spiritual experiences has to be turned inward for a time to nourish my own spirituality.
And having said that, this afternoon I sat down to begin putting the basics down in a document for an article I proposed to WynterGreene for the Spring spiritual gardening issue. More spiritual-guidance type writing, yes; but I’m doing this from a different perspective. Also, it’s been over a year since I handed off the green witch book, so my brain has had time to recover from intense immersion in the subject and the ensuing evasion of even thinking about it (a perfectly natural form of self-defense when one has eaten/breathed/slept a single subject for over a year, in order to avoid burnout), and now I’m actually beginning to sense a revival of my interest in the topic again. It’s terribly nice to finish this article outline and already be a third of the way to my target word count. It means that when I expand the point-form outline into full sentences I’ll be over halfway there, and then when I add sentences to further explore/explain and link things I’ll be right where I’m supposed to be. As a requested submission for the same issue I’m also working on an annotated bibliography of sorts of selected titles I used as reference for WotGW, and it’s much harder to narrow the list down to my top ten ten picks from the list of books than I expected it to be. It feels good to have made this much progress on both articles when I was only expecting to work on one.
Countdown to Imbolc, my favourite festival: Nine days!
Total word count, Swan Sister: 29,617
New words today: 2,866
There’s a tiny voice in the back of my brain that’s saying “you’re only 150 words away from accomplishing 3K today”, and I am putting my hands over my ears and singing “LA LA LA” to drown it out because I am exhausted and I refuse to drag this out.
Angst, characters trying to figure out what happened, more angst, characters trying to figure out what to do next, some angst, then skinning and dressing a swan and practicalities like what to do with all the bits.
Yeah, it’s been that kind of day. Three and a half hours of this. But I may have gotten the story to a place where it can actually move again, now. The Significant Stuff of this portion of the book has been dealt with, and now everyone can get going and act.
Argh! My characters are angsting about the last scene and what happened therein.
So of course I have now combined Radio Sunnydale and BtVS: The Album in a playlist to counter it. (Because there’s nothing angsty about Buffy, oh no.)
No, this music is not conducive to the era or atmosphere I am trying to cultivate for this novel. But it’s sure destroying the angst that’s built up. Move on, people. Advance the plot! Quit moaning about how your lives are changing and how you don’t know where you’re going, and get on with the change.
(See? Right on cue, Joey Ramone’s “Stop Thinking About It” has come up. Obey Joey, characters.)
LATER: Yes, butchering and skinning swans is a much better activity than angsting. Yikes. (Now I theoretically know how to skin a bird. I should go through Fearsclave‘s archives and dig out all the entries that discuss dressing fowl corpses, to pay more attention to detail.)