Well, it's Thursday the 4th of September, and I have only two or three hours before our son will be up for dinner .... It would be very easy to say that's not enough time to do any significant work, but that would be just an excuse!

I ~have~ done ~some~ writing this week. About three weeks ago I drafted a story (currently under 1,000 words) called "Reflections," and yesterday I revised it (adding a couple of hundred words to fill in some gaps that a reader-friend noticed).

The backlog of work that is crouched on my desk with its eyes narrowed at me is a bit overwhelming, and I'm playing catch-up when I've finished this post. I've got three dozen or so inmate letters to answer. I did 10 yesterday, and posted them this morning, and only picked up 4 more from the post office, so at least mathematically I'm making some progress. The stack is still threatening to fall over and bury everything else, though.

I've also got some reviews to do. They're written in my head, but that doesn't do my editors any good at all! Last night, a friend who edits a very, very small newsletter called and asked me for something about Mabon, and as her deadline is immediate, I dashed something off and sent it in less than an hour after we hung up.

But I had to ask members of my writing group what I brought last time, as I couldn't find it in my computer and couldn't remember. Thankfully, they did, so now I know what to take next time. I've started taking one short thing to read -- this month, that'll be "Reflections" -- and one longer piece to give them to take home and scribble comments on. (The shorter things are not too complex to hear without a hard copy for reference, and I'm more interested in ... the ambiance they project than in the grammar, so they're appropriate to just read aloud.)

I've got a sewing project I need to finish in the next week or so, too. See, a friend's coming down the weekend of the 19th to help me match a plaid, and I need to make a practice skirt with the pattern first, so we can see how the pattern needs to be adjusted. I've got the pieces cut out, and the sewing machine's on the dining room table ready to set up, but I haven't actually gotten to even the stay-stitching yet!

A lot of our time this last week has been taken up with some follow-up on-line research about a vacation club system we just bought into, and some has gone to a series of e-mails about our July 2009 trip to Scotland and the revision of the first part of the itinerary that we needed to make when we found out about an event we didn't want to miss. Then there was another set of e-mails about a minor disaster suffered by another group I belong to. Those inspired a few phone calls I had to answer ....

And there was a (routine) doctor's appointment and our (regular) exercise sessions, and an anxiety attack that took me two days to get over. That left me so "hung over" that I didn't even try to write anything. Instead, I spent a day clearing out a spare room, getting rid of a fair amount of stuff and putting the rest away properly. I find that after an anxiety attack, doing stuff like that helps me ground and re-center.

(The anxiety is "free floating," which means it doesn't have to be anything rationally troubling that triggers it, and often as not, I don't have a clear idea of what sets it off. But when it gets bad enough that the Rx doesn't help and I have to spend the night on the couch with Nick-at-Night in the background, I'm always zoned out for the following two days. It's like when you have a fierce, debilitating headache and for a day or two after it finally goes away, you're still wary of it coming back. In my case, it's partly about the hours of daylight, but there are other components, which I believe are also inherited, 'cause my mom had to cope with it, too. At least mine is good for clearing out the spare rooms once or twice a year. ;-)

On the other hand, I'm not sure I can't count writing letters to inmates -- I volunteer in my capacity as a Wiccan priestess for a Neo-Pagan prison ministry, Mother Earth Ministries -- doesn't count as writing. I mean, it is putting words on paper ... narrative non-fiction, shall we call it? (Check out MEM at www.MotherEarthMinistries.org.)

As soon as I catch up on my letters, I need to prepare a synopsis for the editor I'm having a meeting with at an up-coming writing conference. That would be Wrangling with Writing, presented, for the 36th year in a row, by the Society of Southwestern Authors. It's a two-day event here in Tucson, and this will be my third year attending. I met my agent at the first one I went to, and have learned a lot from the workshops, too. (For more about that, check out www.ssa-az.org.)

The only good thing about all this not-writing I've been doing is that all of it is grist for my story, novel, and essay mills. At least, that's the theory!

Happy keyboarding!
Ashleen





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