Novellas, Laundry, and Revelations

I’m supposed to be cleaning the apartment right now. My parents, sister, and niece are coming out tomorrow evening for the week (not staying here, but still will be plenty of time spent here), and my mother-in-law is getting here on Friday for the weekend. Joy’s first ballet recital is on Saturday, hence the family. Hence the need to clean.

Which is why I’m blogging, naturally.

What I really (really, really) want to be be doing is editing the sci-fi novella I wrote in four days last week. Three points against that:

I wrote 29,000 words in four days and pretty much broke my brain; it needs a break from excessive wording.

I finished writing it yesterday morning right before church; it needs to sit for a while before I go back to edit, there’s no point in diving in now because it’s too fresh.

Because of all the mad writing last week, the apartment is a disaster, and even if I didn’t have family coming in this week I would need to clean. I need to trade in my writer hat for my real person hat this week.

So, I’m trying to be good. But I still don’t feel much like cleaning, and I drank too much coffee this morning so I’m wired, so I’m hoping blogging satisfies the writing desire and also calms me down enough to tackle the mountain of clothes teetering next to my bed, and the school papers that I need to grade (Joy  discovered the concept of grading recently thanks to Daddy’s papers and assignments, and now she begs me to grade all her school work, strange child) and sort, and scrub the tooth powder stains out of the sink.

And then bake some brownies for getting together with a friend this evening.

(I’m starting to convince myself to get started here.)

I have to say, as exhausting and overwhelming and bizarre as it was to write a 29,000 word novella in four days, it was also kind of amazing. The story grabbed me last Sunday, and I tried to ignore it, but it wouldn’t go away, so I tried to jot down the plot outline so I could write it later, but that didn’t work, and finally I started to write it thinking that I could just peck away at it whenever I needed a break from my two current “real” writing projects, and then the next thing I knew I was writing madly every spare moment (and a few not-spare ones – hence the pile-up of chores). Then, Sunday morning, I typed the last few hundred words about ten minutes before we left the house, and now I’m still trying to figure out how on earth that happened.

Exhausting and amazing and kind of encouraging to think that someday, in about thirteen years when Grace is off to college or whatever she chooses to do with her life and Carl’s no longer in school and we can share chores more equally, it might not take me two to four years to write one book.

And that, in turn, makes it easier now to put more focus on the everyday-life things, and ease up on my own internal pressure to do more writing, because the seasons will eventually change and things will be reversed, and I’m not missing out on my chances if I’m a slow writer now.

So all in all, an incredibly satisfying week last week.

And now I think I’m really done procrastinating.

Happy Monday, everyone!