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Where I'm AtNovember 17, 2008 In my post-election/Guy Fawkes euphoria I totally blew off a November 5 haircut appointment -- and didn't even realize it till last Thursday. Is life running away from me or what? I've got excuses out the wazoo, but here are the reasons: An editorial clean-up that should have taken three days max but went on for almost four weeks because the author rewrote the book. That's now done but I'm on to the second pass of a job I shouldn't have taken in the first place: it looked to be a medium substantive edit but turned out to be a heavy rewrite that engaged way, way too much of my writerly energies at a time when I needed them for other things. I also seriously underbid it. Chalk it up as a learning experience: When bidding a job, pay close attention to the overall structure as well as the discrete sentences; if my writerly self is going to be engaged, the project better not feel like a waste of time. Intellectually I understand about learning experiences, but my inner eight-year-old is stamping her feet and yelling, "I've learned the lessons already! Why can't I go do something else?" The way out is through, as I'm fond of reminding myself. The only way this job is going away is if I finish it. The second pass is turning out to be a little less grueling than the first, but not by much. Doing barn chores mid day, every day, for a friend recovering from knee surgery. It's less the time involved than the timing: breaking the day in the middle throws my rhythm off, and it seems like I'm always interrupting a project just as I've (finally) gotten into it. One of the huge bennies of freelancing is the ability to develop one's own schedule, and my organically developed schedule has been screwed up for almost two months. It got worse after the time change at the beginning of the month. Arrgghh. Promoting The Mud of the Place -- and working myself into a slow simmer over the inertia of island newspapers and bookstores. The Gazette has assigned a reviewer -- I know this because I ran into her at the Oak Bluffs library one day when I stopped by to introduce myself and Mud to the events coordinator -- but from the Other Paper (as the Gazette used to call it) I have heard nothing. The open-for-business bookstore didn't have Mud in stock when deadline passed for my first ad in the MVTimes, so I left them out of it. I'm continuing to leave them out till they call me. At one point in the novel Jay (I think it was Jay) refers to Martha's Vineyard as a place where ambition is useless and apathy a virtue. Storyteller Susan Klein, an island native and very smart cookie, was so taken with the description that she quoted it in her blurb about the book. Jay was right, and things haven't changed since he said so. Working with Heather Goff of goffgrafix to get the Mudsite up and running. It's beautiful and I love it: come visit! www.themudoftheplace.com. Going to dog school with Travvy. This is fun. This makes me think I should be raising malamutes instead of writing books. I also joined a writers' group -- Sunday nights at Cleaveland House, home of mystery writer Cynthia Riggs, also a Mud blurber. The group isn't quite new; it's been re-formed or reconstituted from a previous same-time, same-place group that hadn't met for a few months. I've been to two meetings and though I'm not sure I'll stick with it, it's already inspired me to summon Squatters' Speakeasy up from the bowels of WordPerfect and take copies of the first scene to the group. So I've been flipping from fury to depression and back again, over and over, and not writing in the bloggery because my brain was so bilious. The good news is that things are looking up. The way out is through, and the best antidote for depression and fury is to keep putting one foot in front of the other, even if the steps are small. Forward motion is good. My knee-impaired friend is, as of today, off crutches and able to assume more of her own barn work. I'm dreaming up PR ideas to circumvent the lackadaisical newspaper and bookstore. I'm writing in this bloggery.
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