The nightmare is almost over. I've been living inside of a perfect storm this week, one that has two nights of parent-teacher conferences, has seen my sitting for the infamous puppies yet again, and has me shaking off the very last bits of what wasn't really a cold but more of a consistent bout with bronchitis. Nightmare might be exaggerating, and of course there have been many other moments along the way that have been successful and positive or hard to deal with, but Spencer and I are sitting here on the verge of things going back to normal, and I think we both appreciate that.
Things have generally worked out okay; I survived conferences and had young Mr. Bomani stopping over to let the puppies out, and I'll be taking said puppies back to their other home away from home at my sister's tomorrow morning, and at this point the antibiotics seem to have taken care of as much of the illness as they are going to. These days I'm just washing my hands compulsively and changing up my diet to get more of the healthy keep-you-from-getting-sick kinds of foods into my system.
But now that February is over, I'll be in a better position to write again. The girls who challenged me to go Personal Nanowrimo all over February wound up disappointed; if I had known the kind of month I'd been facing at the beginning, I wouldn't have taken on the project. But with life back to being as normal as it ever gets, I'll be able to dive back into completing their book with as much enthusiasm as I can put together for a book that feels more like a homework assignment than one I'm really excited about... at least at this point, and hopefully that will change as I get more into it.
I finish that, and I've got my to-do list pretty full through the summer. My huge family has one of our own in Afghanistan right now, where he will be for at least another year. Obviously we're concerned and praying for him to arrive home safely at the end of his tour. I'll be supporting him in the best way I know how - writing. I'll be starting a novel for him to read while he's there and sending it a chapter or so at a time to give him something that will hopefully offer occasional breaks in the monotony of whatever chunk of desert he'll be living and working in. Since his two favorite genres are fantasy and non-fiction regarding ancient history, I'll be taking a shot at fantasy; well out of my comfort zone, but all it has to do is give him something else to think about from time to time so I'm just focusing on making sure it doesn't suck.
Then, once the fortune cookie book (the one I'm doing for my personal nan0wrimo) is done, I'll be breaking back into a book I wrote about ten years ago called Grandpa, which I only ever gave a half-hearted attempt at getting published even though after recently revisiting it there's some pretty good stuff in it. I think the added experience of the past 10 years will give me a chance at revising it up into a much better manuscript. At that point I'm thinking (hoping) it will be about summer break, and I'll have three completed manuscripts out there and enough time to write the query letters that will (hopefully) get some agents interested in seeing them. Also by summer, I hope to have started my next real novel, which, given the ideas I have for it right now, could wind up as the biggest project I've taken on since writing my memoir four years ago.
I keep saying some derivation of "hope" while discussing all of this, because let's face it: The writing doesn't always get done. There's always a lot of other stuff that gets in the way during that time. After all, life happens the way it does.
Great. Three dogs just came walking into my office, and two of them are looking up at me with palpable guilt in their eyes. What did they chew up this time....
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