Cara Mia

My apologies in advance, for I am feeling a bit smug this morning.

Suffice it to say, deciding to flex and exercise my writing muscles again with a new Scotty was an incredibly smart decision. I started with a very slow, hesitant 1300 words on Sunday that took about four hours to do…and then when I got home from work last night, blasted out a quick 2000 more (about an hour or so) that not only advanced the story (which I was making up as I went) and now I am starting to get there. I’ve also not created a Scotty completely from scratch in a very long time, starting with nothing more than a situation and a title and making it up as I go along. And you know what?

It fucking felt fantastic. Highly recommended, would definitely do again.

I’m kind of excited about getting home tonight (after making groceries) and writing even more!

I also channeled that momentum into finishing the dishes and cleaning out the sink once I’d printed out the pages from yesterday. All the dishes are clean, and Paul finished the laundry for me while I was at the office, bless his heart. After finishing the chores, we watched a few episodes of Solar Opposites, which is fantastic, and then I caught up on the news and so forth before heading to bed. A rather exciting Gregalicious evening, no? I can’t tell you how thrilled I was to let whatever it is take over and bang out those 2k words last night–and they aren’t bad, either. Huzzah for me! I also ordered pizza for dinner last night, which was also really good and hit the spot. It was quite a lovely Monday from start to finish, frankly, and I never really felt tired all day, either. This morning I am awake, firing on most cylinders and have no desire or need to go back to bed, and that’s terrific, too.

And my, this coffee is tasty this morning.

Not a bad way at all of starting the day, and not at all a bad way to feel on Tuesday morning, either. It’s lovely when you have a couple of really good days when you feel like yourself again. The missing piece in my life has been the writing, honestly, and now that I am starting (no guarantees it will last, after all, or that I’ll feel that way every morning going forward) to get back into the groove of writing again, I remember feeling this good before and I want to keep feeling this good, you know? It’s so easy to have a down day and then turn that into a malaise that lasts far too long for my comfort. I’m still feeling my way through this recovery-from-everything period, and it’s really kind of nice. It really does feel like there was a dark cloud in my brain for years, keeping me from relaxing or even being able to enjoy the thrills and good parts of authoring. I’ve often mused about my not being able to ever be able to actually enjoy the highs of my career and being me because there’s always something clouding my neurons and synapses. It was very cool being nominated for three Anthony Awards last year (and I lost all three), and an Agatha and a Lefty. That’s five award nominations in a year, with no wins, but I don’t really mind not winning, much as I joke about being such a unrelenting awards loser–but a lot of writers are never nominated for even one writing award, and I certainly never saw myself as ever being nominated for any mainstream awards, so each one is truly a wonderful blessing.

And it’s a lot of fun pretending to be bitter about always losing awards.

Everyone is beginning to start their Bouchercon travels, which is popping up all over my social media feeds, and is giving me serious FOMO. But it’s simply not in the cards for me to head up to Bouchercon this year, and I think taking a full year away from conferences and so forth while readjusting and settling into my life again is probably a good idea. It’s also kind of a good thing that I had/have so much free and down time over the last year or so; not only to mentally and physically recover but to reassess and rethink a lot of things. It’s not so much that I have a new attitude (although I do) about my career and life, but I need to take more time to be appreciative of how lucky I’ve been, and how much my hard work has paid off over the years.

It’s very easy to confuse wanting greater success with feeling like a failure because you aren’t there, and that is something I definitely need to remember.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Tuesday, and I probably won’t be back later; but hey–stranger things have happened.