It’s a dark morning. The skies are clouded over, there’s a breeze too light to hear rustling through the leaves, and there’s a heavy, humid stillness over the world. It would feel like a foreboding omen, except I’ve looked at the weather, and there’s no sign of a heat-breaking thunderstorm on the horizon, so it’s just quiet.
I’m obsessing over the story I submitted Sunday night (Woo! Submission!). I’m obsessed with the awesome, amazing, satisfying feeling of having even gotten something submitted in August. It’s been so long since I got something fresh out, and it feels SO GOOD. I need to figure out a way to get more out with some regularity, because I need this just to feel like a “real” writer. And then I’m also obsessing, because the place I sent it to has online tracking, and GOOD GRIEF I should not look at that kind of thing. Yesterday, I had to put a moratorium on checking it until 9PM. Today, I think I’m going to have to do the same thing. Noon and 9PM, if the rejection hasn’t come in yet. (But the place–if you can guess–is pretty damn fast about their turnaround, so it very well could come between now and then, since it’s currently Under Review.)
I’m finishing up my banana/berry/spinach smoothie and have Bug set up with his morning Winnie the Pooh (my parents–bless them!–recorded and saved almost every episode of The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh from my childhood, and recently my dad digitized them), so I can get all my morning chores done. Writing comes later. If I get all my tidying/readying things done early, then the rest of the day is a lot more relaxed and flexible (and staying on top of the dishes allows me to write a bit in the early evenings). Since it doesn’t look like rain, maybe we’ll go to the park before it gets too sunny and scorching. Another hot day, up in the mid-to-high eighties, with high humidity.
Today, I buckle down and start the hard rewrite of “Any Day But Today.” I’m still feeling out the finale, trying to figure out if it’s the finale I want, or if it’s just a fall-back. Puzzling on themes and substory, too. We’ll see. I’m hoping retyping it makes some of the possible forks in the road a bit clearer to see and choose between. We’ll see how that goes…
Over and out!
Maggie Slater 