I had a miserable day. …

I had a miserable day. In the morning, Adriana came to babysit, but I decided to stick around and pack in the morning, so that I'd get a little more time with Kavi, who has clearly been missing me. I figured I'd write in the afternoon, during her three-hour nap, with Kevin taking over when Adriana left at 1. But for most of the morning Kavi was a whiny, clingy little girl who generally refused to play with Adriana and made it incredibly difficult for me to pack -- particularly frustrating because Adriana said she's normally fine when I'm not here. Argh. And then it turned out Kevin had a migraine-type thing (blinding headache and nausea), so I ended up on child duty in the afternoon.

Which is fine, in theory -- I don't have anything super-urgent I had to get done, and he's certainly allowed to be sick. But it made me feel like I made bad choices in my day-planning (not that I could have predicted Kevin's sickness, but do not expect rationality from me now, please). And mostly I just feel like time is slipping away. I'm still really upset about the house being delayed another month. It's now looking like it's going to be at least sixteen months from purchase to move-in -- and with the way things are going and what all of you have been warning me of, I wouldn't be suprised if it was more like a year-and-a-half, or even two years. Kevin thinks I'm being a little overly doom-and-gloom about it all now, but really, it feels like we are never ever going to move into this house, that nothing will be done on it at all. That it is all just a beautiful dream in my head. I walked Jed through a few days ago, saying things like, "This is where the guest bedroom and guest bath will be, where you'll be staying." And I didn't really believe it. What I actually have are broken walls and floors with a lot of rusty nails sticking straight up.

And then there's the YA fantasy novel, which I really really really want to finish writing. I'm only a quarter of the way through, but it's a solid quarter, a publishable quarter, and people seem to really like it, and all I want to do is go back to it and finish it and send it out and fingers crossed, find a publisher who also loves it and will sink tons of money into it so that we can stop worrying about how tight our budget is on the house stuff. And also so lots of people will read it and love it, of course. And I thought I'd write all through May, but most of May was eaten up by end of semester and catching up on long-overduenesses and WisCon. And now it's June 4th and already I've done essentially no writing on it. I haven't even managed to think about it when I've tried to -- it's all out of my head now. I'm going to need to re-read the whole thing just to get back in that story mode.

Every day, dammit. That was my plan for this summer -- to write at least 2-4 hours every day. We are paying for tons of childcare we can barely afford (or possibly not actually afford) so I can do just that. And somehow there is always something else that needs doing. I know I ought to make writing a priority, that I ought to take it seriously, but there is so much else that is actually urgent.

Anyway, I was feeling miserable, I couldn't think or concentrate or sleep, so I ended up spending an hour ego-googling on livejournal, and ran into all kinds of nice comments about my Guest of Honor speech, and further back, my two posts at Whatever, so at least I feel somewhat better about myself and my writing abilities. In theory, anyway. Tomorrow, Jarmila comes, and as soon as she gets here, I'm heading out to the cafe. To write, dammit. In the afternoon, I'll be doing hours upon hours of packing, but first and foremost, I make time to write. The packing can go hang.