Trading Doubt for Relief

When school is in session, managing my teaching and my classroom and all of the peripheral nonsense that accompanies it is more than enough to keep me occupied. This usually means I start my summer with a long To-Do list. It typically includes the kinds of jobs, chores, errands, and appointments I'll decide I don't have time (or want to make time) for when I'm surviving the school year.

This year, most of that list won't get done. I'm pretty sure I'm not going to make a run to the county landfill after cleaning out my garage. I don't know if I'll bother calling the plumber to get that dang toilet in the guest bathroom fixed so the handle doesn't always have to be lifted manually after flushing. That light above my kitchen sink window, that works but is jiggled just far enough out of position to keep it from turning on? That still might be running dark this winter. Unless all of that junk mail stacking up in my office finds away to shred itself, I suspect it's going to look remarkably like it does now when the first day of school rolls around.

Usually any one of these things being left unattended would give me more than enough reason to beat up on myself. I'd be thinking, "Two and a half months of wide open days, and you couldn't set aside enough time to just take care of these things? Even though they bother you so much and really wouldn't take a lot of effort to get done, you just blew them off? Again? Still?!"

But that won't be this year. 

This year I'll be able to start school knowing that, for the first time in several years, I went from start to finish and completed the entire draft of a brand new book. I'm not there yet, but I'm close enough to see the finish line. In fact, I could almost predict the date I'll be finished.

This won't be just some NaNoWriMo "write as fast as you can like your hair is on fire" month-long sprint to be able to claim 50,000 incoherent words in the last days of November; this will be a real, actual, honest to God BOOK. A beginning, middle, and end with all the parts in between connected together. Characters that are more than just paper doll place holders with names. A story that I feel has good chances of people wanting to read it and enjoying it after they have, because I feel happy about it.

It's been a struggle to get here. After years of ping-ponging back and forth between two other viable manuscripts with my agent to mold them into their best possible selves, I had no doubts that my skill as an editor was benefitting from tons and tons of practice. But writing again? Bringing something of this magnitude into being from nothing but a list of ideas I thought were cool? It's been a long time. I tried it last year and failed spectacularly, to the degree I legitimately began wondering if I even remembered how to start. 

Well, it turns out I did remember. And the relief that comes with that remembering is palpable. 

So those chores I never completed?
Any wandering day trips I didn't take?
The way my eyes feel permanently blurred over by evening?
The books I didn't get to read, or the TV shows I didn't have time to binge?
The hundreds of hours spent in my kitchen, looking outside as dozens of sunny days passed me by?

Totally worth it.