Raise your hand if you can believe that it’s already the 10th day of 2010! Yeah, me, neither!
If I fondly imagined that I was going to come bouncing off the long holiday hiatus and shoot right into work, exercise, dietary disciplines and new plans and resolutions like a bright shiny new bullet…I was kidding myself, ha. (Well, I have been exercising. But that is all!)
I didn’t really regard myself in “post holiday back-to-normal” phase until Tuesday, because Monday night was Parish Committee meeting. I’m the Chair, but I’ve missed the last two meetings because of my video production class. So, on Monday I needed to spend some time in the afternoon reviewing the minutes and e-group posts, and writing up the agenda for the meeting. We met at the minister’s home (this saves us having to heat the church just for our meeting, which costs a ridiculous amount of money). The meeting went fine and it was nice to get together with everyone again. One fellow committee member had brought me some food she wanted to give away (I believe they’d been left by her visiting son, who eats a diet like mine)–dry lentils and barley and beans. My car got stuck in the minister’s driveway briefly when I left after the meeting, but fortunately I was able to extricate it with a only a small fuss and didn’t have to ask for help.
When I got up Tuesday morning, finally done with all the obligations and plans and committments that had tossed my work routines and disciplines into the air like so much green salad for a whole month, I was suffering from “decompression crash syndrome.” All I wanted to do was sleep, and I’m still having to fight off the constant sense that I can’t really buckle down to any project more ambitious than cleaning the litter boxes because I’ll just have to stop in the middle and go do other things and not get back to it for days. That anticipation of interruption, whether real or illusory, is the single biggest reason I don’t get things done. 🙁 The little fuss with my dad and the Heart Station on Thursday didn’t do my productivity any good, either. However, I’ve been working on review queries for Gideon Redoak and Cat the Vamp, and possible cover blurb sources for Krymsin Nocturnes and The Longer the Fall.
I also completed and submitted two writers’ grant applications this week. One I’ve applied for before, the other is new. I used some of the draft of All the Shadows of the Rainbow for the sample manuscript of one application, so I’m already getting that book out into public view. I also posted the synopsis to my author website, if anyone is curious about it.
One of the grant applications requested an “artist résumé.” I’d never actually written up a comprehensive artist résumé for myself. I had selected components of such a résumé scattered in numerous places but I hadn’t put them all together. So, I spent a number of hours this week completing that. When I had it all finished, I was really amazed. The damn thing runs for more than four pages! I sure look busy–and I also look like I’ve been pretty serious about writing, at least articles and reviews, for the past several years. Seeing a lifetime’s work all lined up like that really puts my artistic work (writing and design) into a new perspective!
At any event, preparing both those applications also took up a lot of time, with material submitted electronically and by snail mail. Now I just have to wait and see what happens. Meanwhile, I’m wondering if I can get a small business grant and maybe hire an intern or something. After all, I’m paying authors royalties! Just a little nudge and I can actually, you know, Create A Job! That’s worth some stimulus money, don’t you think?
I’ve been catching up with errands and shopping that I simply hadn’t gotten to, with all the time I spent with family, and two Fridays in a row being holidays. I finally got a hair cut, whew! It felt downright weird to be doing Friday errands on Friday this week. I also did a lot of cooking on Friday–not so much because I really wanted to, as because I needed to make up some batches of food, and I had things that had to be used. I cooked two kinds of soup–lentil/turkey and bean/bacon–tried out making a loaf of whole wheat bread with pumpkin, which worked very well, and made another batch of my “healthy” oatmeal cookies with pumpkin and no butter or fat at all, which also worked very well. Trouble is, I wasn’t really in a cooking mood, and by the end of the night, I felt like I’d been doing nothing all day but wash dishes. 🙁
Yesterday, I started working on the Very. Last. Edit. of The Longer the Fall. I want to get the ARCs out this month. I don’t know if I’ll make it, but if I do, I can set the release date for May. That’s what I’ve been doing today, aside from a short Readercon meeting that I telecommed into, and bumming over today’s utterly dismal Patriots game. I need to get cycling done, though!