The Basement Office

I can’t say it’s been a good week.  Life kicked my ass.

That’s an excuse, not a reason.   There’s a difference.

An excuse is what you say kept you from doing what you needed and wanted to do, but the truth is that you chose not to do what you needed or wanted to do.  A reason is a real thing that actually stops you from doing what you needed or wanted to do.

I can admit to myself that these are excuses, not reasons.

Still, it hasn’t been all bad, there’s a been a lot of good!

My daughter chose this week to start giving us real trouble at bedtime with what we believe is separation anxiety.  My wife, who’s super awesome, has been having increasingly more trouble putting the little one down for the night so I stepped in a bit.  This helped a bit, but she also decided a day later to just not sleep, which meant both of us tag teaming so we could manage to put her down.

This made for a serious lack of sleep for my wife and I.  She’s super.  Me?  Not so much.

When I miss a night or two of sleep, I just dive straight into hell.  I can’t think and I definitely can’t write.  You might have noticed this by the lack of site updates this week.  Sorry guys, while I did keep up (almost) with the daily word count, my first priority was to writing rather than blogging.

Any writing I did do, I give full credit to my wife.  If she wasn’t so tough and had these wicked super mom powers I don’t know what I’d do.  I have it pretty good all things considered.

I try and make up for it by not letting her or myself down too much and that means (in part) getting serious about writing.

Here’s some of the good parts.

I’m almost finished with my manuscript rewrite’s outline and I’ve got a third of the thing blocked out by chapter and scene.  I’m itching to get writing and I’ve already broken my rule about not writing til I was done outlining because I was just so excited with my new ideas and the change in tense and style.  I’m very eager to move along with this.

I’ve given myself a short story project to work on.  I’ve got a good feeling about this story and it’s for a contest that I stumbled on while listening to many podcasts.   The idea and synopsis are getting good vibes from my advisors.  In my gut, I feel it has legs, this weekend I’m going to see if it can walk.  If it can walk, I’ll make it run.   I’m keeping my fingers crossed on this one.

The way I see it, I can’t lose.  I can only fail if I don’t finish the story and I don’t send it in.   I don’t care if I’m included in the anthology or not (but it would be really nice).

Stay tuned!