Here's what it looked like at the start of summer break...
...and here's what it looks like today, on the last day before I report back to school:
As driven as I usually am regarding to-do lists, I never seem to completely finish them off, and instead end up making compromises with myself about why the last few items don't get done. Even though there's nothing remaining on the fridge that requires emergency attention, I do look at those last few lonely notes in the second picture and feel some slight mental bruising; I seem to process my ideas of success and failure in terms of absolutes more than I probably should. But that's a topic for a different post.
It's likely I'll give those last few notes an asterisk and extend my available summer until the day the kids start school, so I can get more done and hate my failings a bit less. It wasn't such a bad summer after all, so why end it on a defeatist note? I did get a lot of things done I'd been wanting to for years, and I had some good times along the way as well. I read some good books, listened to some great music, and had a couple of good weekend extended family trips in July. I watched some great (and not so great) television, got into a habit of long morning walks, and did a remodeling / redecorating / reorganizing of my home office that I've wanted to do for years (even if I was nudged into that pretty strongly when the hard drive on my computer crashed and burned).
I didn't immerse myself in writing as thoroughly as I had last summer, but I did get some good work done on revising a second manuscript some of you may know -- The Ghost of Lake Emily. It's about as different from Following Infinity as I could probably get while staying in the middle grade range, and with any luck those stories will turn out to be my first two published works. Even though I've put a lot of thought and work into the Emily revisions, there wasn't much pressure to get through them quickly, but of course I'm still working on them because when writing is a job, Rule #1 is you show up and do the work. The things I'm working on right now -- restructuring parts of the story, reinventing relationships between characters, even redefining some of the characters, all of that beautifully frustrating and painstaking work that makes other people tell writers they don't understand how we can stick with it -- are all tasks that shouldn't be rushed. And anyway, I decided at some point to pull back just a little and follow my agent's advice from earlier in the year, when she and I talked about all of the waiting going on right now. "Enjoy the lull," she said, "because it will be the last one you have in...forever." I've had over a year to learn how consuming it can be to maintain a balance between two different careers, and since I suspect that's only going to become more pronounced as things progress, I thought enjoying the lull wouldn't be such a bad idea. Still, I suspect that someday I'm going to enjoy NOT having a writing lull even more.
And so ends another summer vacation. I'm going to spare all of us any summative statements or force-fed wisdom about beginning a new school year and all the promises and challenges that come with it, and instead just say I'm vaguely optimistic about it. I'm not happy to see break end, but I'm not completely dreading the idea of going back, either. I'm just hoping to successfully navigate my way through all of the highs and lows of the next ten months, and do some good along the way.
Now there's nothing left for me to do but show up tomorrow morning and start discovering what the next year has in store.
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