Really, I’ve been up since 5:20 already. We have company coming into town, so most of the day so far has been taken up with cleaning the house and arranging the guest room—which is at all other times my office.
But I sometimes feel that just being able to get up in the morning and do anything constructive is a minor miracle. Oh, nothing significant about that thought. Usually it’s a matter of choosing among several options and then deciding whether I have either the imagination or the energy to tackle any of them. I often have a period of enervation after completing a novel and the older I get the more intense they seem to be.
I didn’t go to the gym this morning as I normally would have because of the incoming company and other scheduling conflicts. I’d decided that before I found out about the company, but now I wonder if I’ll manage it Wednesday. It is too easy to get into a habit of blowing off certain tasks for later. For instance, I keep meaning to write a new short story (started one yesterday, much to my dismay) or pull out the half dozen I have in rough draft and get them in shape. As long as there is a novel in process, I can feel righteous about putting them off. But I have no excuse now other than just not feeling like it.
Not to mention all the things around the house that need tending to. I do a fair job of keeping up with the entropy, but some things slip by and when I get around to them they have grown in size to unmanageable proportions. I have to work up to tackling them. So far, I always do, but there may come a day…
I’m going to Bouchercon. Since at least two of the projects I have under submission to my new agent (did I tell you about my new agent? I’m sure I did) are mysteries—though in truth at least half my oeuvre to date has been a hybrid of SF and mystery (I mean, it even says so on the cover of Mirage, Chimera, and Aurora, an Asimov Robot Mystery), and there are even some noirish aspects to Remains—it seemed sensible to bite the bullet and go to the mystery convention, especially since it’s going to be here, in St. Louis. The plus also is I get to meet my new agent (did I tell you about my new agent? Oh, yeah, I did) face to face.
It’s been feeling like this year a number of things are going to get fixed. All this getting up in the morning has to count for something, right? But one thing I’ve discovered for certain, and it’s something that had been bothering me—I still love to write. Since March I have been working long days on two of my novels, both of which have received major revisions. Hell, the first one was gutted like a fish and rebuilt almost from the bottom up. But because it felt like it was going somewhere, that something was going to come of it, I dived in and had a ball. This was important. I needed to know this, thought I’d been putting off even asking the question.
So getting up in the morning, while still occasionally a pain, has renewed meaning for me. There’s a point to all this effort and that makes a huge difference. Good may yet come of all this.
I do need to make better use of my time. But that’s always been true. So for now, adieu. I’m off to make time bleed a little and get some more done.
