I Want You Back

And we have made it to Wednesday! A big, hearty clap on the back for everyone! We survived to the midpoint!

At this point, clearly I will take my victories where I can.

When I went to bed last night the election was still too close to call, but I couldn’t stay up–having to get up so early–to watch the returns come in, and so was absolutely delighted to wake up this morning to see the news. I didn’t sleep well again last night–this is becoming too regular of a thing, really–and each time I woke up, I thought, I am afraid to check the news. Yesterday was not a good day–I was tired for most of it (the sleep issue thing) and got some bad news about a dear friend before I went to the gym after work. Bad news from Georgia literally may have been too much to take this morning…so thank you, Stacey Abrams and Georgia voters, especially the Black women.

I am, when I don’t feel like I am knocking at death’s door from being tired, getting prepared to dive into the final revision of the Kansas book, aka #shedeservedit. I have the most recent full draft printed out and sitting in a pile on my desk, with the four chapters of the most recent partial draft–when I tried to write it in first person present tense, and the less said about that the better–to reread and start pulling out threads and seeing what unravels and unspools and what holds true. I wrote the manuscript originally in one month over the summer about six or so years ago–I wrote it partly in response to several horrific rape cases involving high school students and the subsequent on-line bullying of the victims in Steubenville, Ohio and Marysville, Missouri–and wrote pretty much a three thousand word chapter almost every day to get it up to sixty thousand words (it currently sits at over seventy -two thousand), and I also never wrote the final chapter–still haven’t–because there was a gaping hole in the plot I needed to sew up…and over the years, I could never quite figure out how to do that. I did finally figure it out about a year or so ago, but have never had the chance to get back to the manuscript in the meantime, so now I am going to finally finish this thing and send it out into the world.

I also have to write a guest blog post at some point today–and I still don’t know what I am going to write about. Heavy heaving sigh–this is the problem with insomnia, you get too tired to think clearly. Caffeine isn’t working as well as I would like this morning, either, and I am hoping that the shower will do the trick. But at least tomorrow I can sleep a bit later, and it’s a work-at-home day, so I will be making condom packs and watching movies in my easy chair for a good portion of the next two days, and then it’s the weekend. Of course, the weekend doesn’t really matter when you’re fighting insomnia….

And I have so much work to do, not just on the writing front. I have to get that blog entry written, and I have to finish a short story over the course of this weekend, not to mention all the other stuff I have to do for other projects and volunteer work. This is partly why it’s so important for me to be able to sleep–my brain just doesn’t function properly without the right amount of sleep for the evening, and when it runs over the course of several days, as it has done lately–well, as you can imagine, it’s not the best for me.

Even sadder, I think my espresso machine is on its last legs, alas. I got it after our wonderful week in Italy–whenever that was (I looked it up; 2014, so nearly seven years ago. Ironically, the easiest way for me to find the date is to look up what year the LSU-Wisconsin game was; it was played the day we flew back, so I was checking the score repeatedly on my phone at Pisa Airport) and I’d been spoiled by having the marvelous cappuccinos you can literally get anywhere that serves coffee. It’s had a good run, and while it is still sort of working and it’s not something I need to replace immediately, I need to start making those plans because it’s going to suck the morning I get up and it has expired….

And on that note, I need to get ready for work. Have a lovely day, Constant Reader!