Over the past few weeks, I have been largely absent from the world because I have achieved a new level of busy. Some of it was my doing. Some of it was life pummeling me with lemons faster than I can make lemonade.
I’m not even that big of a lemonade fan.
Things I have done since my last post on September 19, 2013 (NOTE: if you read through the entire list, the best cat picture is at the very end.):
As the title of my blog implies, my life is chaos. I’m hitting the road, or gently caressing it with my car’s tires, once again to head up to a con in Baltimore. I’ll be spending the weekend within spitting distance of the Baltimore harbor at North American Discworld Convention, which revolves around Terry Pratchett’s Discworld.
The man himself is not coming anymore, but the con should still be a lot of fun. I’m volunteering, so I imagine I’ll be running around a fair bit. Don’t count on there being many updates to this blog or my Twitter feed. I may get some time to write, or I might not. My schedule is a mystery that I will soon solve.
Crafting a daily routine that involves exercise, writing, and eating food that doesn’t come out of a microwave box shouldn’t be hard. But it is.
I kind of let myself go when I first moved back to North Carolina because the environment at my last job was so stressful and drama-filled that I just wanted to coast for a while.
I was ready to stop coasting two weeks ago, but then the whole women-plan-Fate-laughs thing happened and I woke up with a fever the day after I wrote that post. These delightful surprises are what tend to happen anytime I start finding some semblance of balance in my life. Like many people, I sometimes imagine Fate as an Indian Empress lounging on a silk-covered chaise next to a pool that shows her the world at large, being fanned and fed by devoted slaves as she concocts nefarious plots to mess with my life.
Many people like to use a roller coaster metaphor when they’re talking about life. One of the problems I’ve always had with that metaphor is that roller coasters have chains that pull them up hills. In life, there really isn’t anything or anyone who can yank you up a hill but yourself. There may be things that are out of your control, yet that doesn’t change the fact that the only one who can power the climb up that hill is you.
The part of the metaphor I do like though is the idea of letting go at the top of the hill and just seeing where the tracks take you.
Bet you thought I’ve gone off the deep end with a title like that, eh? It’s relevant, I promise. To prove it, I’ll talk about the fish first. The breakdancing cat will be after the jump.
I’ve never seen an overweight goldfish. But after my first swim practice in more than a decade, I can imagine what one feels like. By the end of the second lap, I wanted nothing more than to reach the end of the pool and pass out belly-up on the lane line.
It didn’t help that the bowl of chili I ate before practice was sitting in my stomach like a lead-plated ostrich egg. Not the best way to remember that eating before practice is a BAD idea.
Billing itself as an “idyllic writer’s retreat smackdab in the middle of your crazy life,” Camp NaNoWriMo is for people who either enjoy subjecting themselves to NaNoWriMo more than once a year, or for folks who believe teaching the cat to swim is a more likely than writing a novel in November because of all the holiday hooplah.
I feel like I nodded off in October and woke up in December with only a vague recollection of the month-long chaos that was November. It feels like a dream already. Who knows, maybe it was?
Well if I managed to write 50,000 words while I was asleep and didn’t realize it then this getting to be a published author thing is gonna be vanilla cake. Or maybe red velvet. Haven’t made up my mind yet.
I’ve finally caught up, and I’m on track to finish on time. (The progress bar may not reflect that just yet because it is not cooperating with me at the moment.) I will probably push to finish tonight so that I can spend Friday kicking back and celebrating. Plus, spec fic author Cherie Priest will be doing a reading at my favorite indy bookstore in Chapel Hill, and I don’t want to miss it, or be thinking about my novel while she’s trying to read hers.
