After several months of house projects and doctor’s appointments and more appointments and travel and anniversaries and birthdays, here’s June, sitting pretty wide open. I’m looking forward to a few quiet weeks before going out of town again! Writing Updates As mentioned last time, I really needed a vacation, so I took one. It was kind of a messy, on-off thing. I can’t even tell you how many days it lasted. But I tell you what, I was excited to…
House painting, multiple appliances in need of repair, community events, pre-traveling errands, traveling, decompressing. It never even occurred to me that I needed to write a blog post until April 30. Oops! Mid-May will mark 5 years since my husband and I embarked on what we call our “funemployment”—leaving our corporate jobs to pursue our own interests. Self-employment has been amazing once I learned how to be a kind boss to myself. I’m mostly there, but there are a few…
Happy belated Persian New Year to all! :) Very often it’s after I’ve declared a section “done” that I start getting the flood of ideas I wish I’d gotten when I was first drafting the thing. “Hey, wouldn’t it be better if [x] happened instead?!” Yes, yes it would. I usually go back and make those changes immediately, especially if they precipitate changes that will carry forward through the rest of the manuscript. I also make sure to correct any…
It’s rare indeed that I can say I got to enjoy sunshine and birds singing on my birthday, which is nestled deep in the most hopeless stretch of winter. A welcome surprise in the moment—but also ominous, what with climate change and all. More and more, our weather has been more reminiscent of Florida than Pennsylvania … more on that in a bit. Writing Updates I have the informal goal of drafting a chapter roughly every 2 weeks, giving myself…
I saw a tweet the other day (sadly, I forget by whom) about how we Americans obsess over productivity and efficiency gains when the most rewarding things we’ll ever do in life—for instance, learning something new or producing something creative—are extremely inefficient processes. It really made me sit back and go, “Huh.” I like to envision my creative process as whittling a statue from a block of marble: put in time and effort, and voila! Finished product. Only it’s not…
I’m happy to report that, aside from epilepsy, my medical adventures have ended for the moment. Surgery is over, all biopsies have come back benign, I’m back on my feet—thank goodness! The past few months have been rough, and even though I tried to keep up with writing and such, I simply didn’t have much focus or creativity in me. While drafting, I lost track of things like who said what to whom and when. I have to go back…
October wasn’t any less turbulent than September. My second surprise biopsy in as many months (benign, thankfully, but I had to wait 2 weeks to hear that), accidentally injuring my foot and damaging my car in unrelated incidents, my husband out of town for multiple weeks (still not back yet), and a shooting that makes international news happening half a mile from my house. The past few days have been surreal. I need to cry once in a while, but…
This was a crazy month. A great deal of phone calls, appointments, tests, waiting, tears, and panic have led to the following conclusion: I have a benign tumor that, because of its positioning, needs to come out. Surgery is penciled in for November. It’s an outpatient procedure and shouldn’t be a huge deal—assuming I clear the final hurdle where they biopsy what they take out to make 100% sure there’s no malignancy. The chance of that is low, but not…
Happy long weekend for those celebrating Labor Day! With highs in the 90s here, it certainly doesn’t feel like summer’s ending yet. I’m looking forward to fall, if or when it arrives! Writing Updates My latest Book 3 draft: 6 chapters/24K words in the can, now working on chapter 7. At this point I’m doing more rewriting from scratch than editing, incorporating details from my earlier drafts that are salvageable, but those are becoming few and far between. I do…
This past Saturday, my city shut down a loop of streets to traffic and opened them up to walkers, runners, and bikers. I happen to live near that loop, so it was easy to head out and join the fun. What a turnout! I’ve never seen so many cyclists in one place before. It was a lot of fun walking directly on some of the major thoroughfares in our city :) Why didn’t I join the cyclists? I’ve told this…