Another week and I look around. Not a hella-lot changed from last to this. On the one hand: Great! On the other: Harrumph! Not harrumph in a necessarily bad way but maybe more in a settled kind of flat-line way. No ups, downs, or sideways on the dad front, which is in fact awesome! (Although I did miss marching and stretching around a stationary chair this week with him as he was not fully feeling up to it. Shout-out to the Silver Sneakers crew and fingers crossed for next week.).Work is fab, teaching is a’rollin’ along. Time ticks. Each hour holding stuff, and all the stuff melting together to make a day.

Maybe that’s the thing. The sense that things are getting done. I’m coloring within the lines and the picture’s just fine. I’m not bored but I am aware that just out of the sightlines there are a couple of things waiting to get my attention. (I’m looking at you unfinished second draft. And, yes, I see you YMCA fob wanting to swipe me into the pool. OK, mountain top views tapping your toes waiting for me to gawk at you on an epic walk.) Talking to a friend about how those things will be at the other end of this particular busy cycle. Intellectually I can believe that. Emotionally not so much. When I give in to that latter mood, I become convinced that tho things on the sideline will move on. My novel will pack up all its ideas and find someone else to bring it to life. The Y fob will just disintigrate while the mountain views will take their beauty elsewhere. Absurd, I know, yet still, no one ever said that the emotional landscape was altogether sane.

Even mining my brain for former music moments, some salacious something to drop into this space, brought me only a hazy sense of distraction wherein I stared out the window while having vague thoughts about what to have for dinner. Maybe the part of me that creates word-like story things has finally taken that long-planned trip to Madrid. Or Barcelona. Or Amsterdam. Although it didn’t put in the proper paperwork to take the time off. Jeez, workers these days.

Anyhoo, I did actually print out my novel’s second draft up to what I’ve polished so far. All 135 pages. Taking the story up and into the second act, which constitutes around halfway through. I took the digital file into the Office Depot, then paid to have it printed out and spiral bound. When I came back to get it and the woman behind the counter asked her workmate “Where did you put this lady’s book?” I got a little thrill. She called it a book. OK, maybe that was the highlight of my week. And by book, I know she pretty much meant that it’s a thing with a spiral binding that they would of course call a book as opposed to something stapled that they’d refer to as a pamphlet. I, on the other hand, felt a jolt roll through me and an inner yes, yes, you see me! I’m a writer of a book! juddered through. Did it inspire me to rush home and work on editing the rest? Not so much. Mostly because I’ve been so long away from the story that I printed it out to read from the beginning. To remind myself that there’s a there there. To be carried back into the lives of the characters and their dramas. And maybe I’ll read it and think, Gah, nothing to see here. Or it will relight that little wick that went sideways like when you get a dud candle and the wick just wimps out and gets drowned in wax. But in this case I want to dig that wick out and set it aflame. I did step out of the Office Depot and read the first page, which I thought was drek, but then I read the second page, which I liked and decided that’s where the whole michegoss should start. I also discovered that in order for me to read this without tinkering, I will have to go to an empty room without any writing instruments, lock myself in, and read without stopping. Otherwise I’ll start making changes immediately, thereby negating the whole point of Just. Read. It. See. If. It. Holds. Up.

So that’s it, really. A week. Current situation. Hum along if you know the tune.