Wistfulness alert: This past week marked ten years that we’ve lived in this house.
It is the longest I’ve lived in any one place.
We had celebrations and memorials, holidays and illness. We’ve welcomed our third child, said goodbye to our beloved first dog and hello to our goofball second dog.
We’ve changed careers. We’ve struggled and we’ve prospered. We’ve suffered and we’ve triumphed. It’s been the home of my midlife.
Continue reading Wandering In the Middle of the Most Familiar Places
Hello, it’s still 2020.
I’ll spare you the ubiquitous “January 2020 was the longest decade of my life” jokes and raise a glass to everyone in solidarity.
Starting rewrites and edits from the beginning is some kind of hilarious because my beginning , a fairly important part of a book to get right, is my biggest mess. I can’t get it to hold up to its importance, so my plan is to revisit it weekly and rewrite it as a “break” between other scenes and chapters. Once I get the beginning good (enough) the rest will flow so much easier, but it’s like strength training. I have to build it up over time and allow my brain muscles and whatever else is up there to rest.
This meant, as it usually does, that the writing suffered and my schedule, which involved getting the first act of my book fully edited by mid-February, was too optimistic. By the third day of January, I was already somehow a week behind, which, while exciting that I somehow have that kind of power over time and space, I can never seem to get that to work to my advantage.
Continue reading A Steady Diet of Metaphorical Elephant — January 2020 Month in Review“What are you working on?”
“Writing my book.”
“Oh. You’re still working on that?”
Continue reading I Don’t Want to Be a Writer
Jackie Pick 