Geez–it’s been awhile, hasn’t it?
So, what’s up, you ask? Or, I guess, seeing that it’s just me and me here, I must be the one asking.
The good news, though, is that I’ve been vacationing this week–but not really vacationing. You see, due to the discrepancy in our jobs Lisa has a bit less time off than I do, so I took this week off by myself.
What, you might ask, have I been up to in this vast amount of free time?
Well, let’s see. First I’ve been sleeping until at least 8:00 every morning. This is quite literally a miracle, as it just doesn’t happen in the regular flow of life around here. If nothing else, the cat will see to it that I’m up earlier–but now that Lisa’s up to go to work, the cat gets fed and I’m free to sleep until, as a co-worker of mine has said, “God wakes me up.”
Then each day has been structured so that I spend the morning writing, the afternoon working outside, and the evening doing some sports junk I do as well as piddling around on the business side of things. This is really pretty good. Along the way I’ve finished off a story or two I had been working on, but the big deal is that I’ve finally, finally got a direction on a novel I’ve been fiddling with for…well…it seems like forever.
This is a big deal, I think.
I started it for the first time about two years ago, but it puttered out. It just felt too ambitious. What it was, in reality, was just poorly formed–too ambiguous. I h ad about 50 pages done, but I just didn’t like it. It wasn’t my best, and more important, I felt like I wasn’t up to it–that I wasn’t good enough. Needless to say, that’s not a particularly fun feeling. But it’s bugged me at times since I put it down. With some serious time at my disposal this week, I pulled it out again and spent a couple hours on it Tuesday and Wednesday. Then, yesterday an idea kind of caught up to me, and my first thought was “wow, that sounds like it would be fun.”
So I fiddled with it today.
I’ll need to dump well over half of what I had completed, and I’ve got a bit of restructuring to do with it. But for the first time in awhile, the idea itself is interesting and I’m enjoying the process of simply thinking about the work.
Wonder if I can take another week, eh?