So, it’s been too long since I updated, but who’s really surprised? The Little Man started crawling a couple weeks ago and began cruising the furniture a day later (though what he really wants to do is RUN), and although I never realized it was such: my momentary peaceful oasis of infant-hood is over. Gone are the long feedings, the stationary examination of one toy at a time, the confidence that the LM could not get into trouble if I ran to the bathroom for a moment. Nope! We are now in full-blown mobile baby territory. Even just reaching for a mug of tea can result in missing the LM dropping from his current cruising location and wind up a bump on bottom or head.
It’s terrifying. And heart-wrenching. (I know to a certain degree, a baby who wants to walk must learn how to fall, and he *is* now learning to drop to his butt first, rather than just back-flopping onto the carpeted floor (thank goodness it’s carpeted!), but ARG! My nerves are shot. I’ve heard mobile babyhood described as akin to a constant suicide watch because of all the things they can get into–the LM’s new favorite is power sockets, which are now all plugged up with plastic covers.)
It also means my reading time has been halved, halved again, and quartered from there, so that really, in the last few weeks, I’ve done, um, almost no reading (or most anything else on my to-do list). That said, I did manage to get out my January short story, so that’s something! I also did a bit of a makeover on the opening of another story that I just can’t help but love, love, love, even though nobody will probably ever publish it, but meh, don’t care. It makes me smile.
And onto the next month! I’ve dug out about eleven first/rough drafts of stories that–looking back sometimes years later–I still really like the core of, and am intending on editing all of them up to submittable par. With my attention-span so fractured at the moment, editing–and some minor rewriting–is about all I can manage in the few short breaks I get to focus on writing. If I’m lucky, I can sometimes get 40 minutes to 2.5 hours to work on writing, depending on the LM’s naps (and it’s more often the former than the latter). I do have some fun ideas for some new stories, and I’ve been toying with continuing a novella I left off in April 2014, but I’m rather enjoying the editing practice. I’ve had lots of practice banging out rough drafts, but not anywhere near as much practice editing them into something decent, so I suspect this will be really good for me. Maybe next year I can do a Chekhov month or year and pile up a ridiculous ton of rough drafts to edit later. Maybe this is my “process”.
Oy. :)
Maggie Slater 