I would love to know why WordPress ate my post. But it’s a simple salad, so I’m not going to bother to rewrite it. Home-grown delicious tomatoes, fresh basil, mozzarella, a little salt, a little pepper, a drizzle of olive oil, some balsamic vinegar, let sit until room temp. Nothing mysterious but very yummy.

Actually, home is sort of a chaotic mess at the moment, but still, it’s nice to be back here.

I had great visions of blogging while we were on vacation, writing quick little daily updates about our adventures, turning it into a vacation that I would always remember… but yeah, that didn’t happen. I also imagined myself reading my auto-immune cookbooks and planning out a month’s worth of menu plans, with recipes and shopping lists, during the copious free time that I would have while R drove the RV. Turns out that didn’t happen, either. I did get to be a passenger some of the time, but I used it pressing buttons on the radio searching for some station that we’d both enjoy (memo to self: next time bring CDs!) or trying to convince the dogs that they didn’t really both need to be in my lap. And occasionally napping.

On the surface, it was a prosaic enough vacation: R and I drove to Pennsylvania and visited relatives. I got to spend some time with an aunt and uncle in State College, an aunt and cousin in New Jersey, and my brother and his family in Allentown. Exciting, right? But it felt like an adventure, because it was the first time I’d driven the RV any serious distance. Putting gas into the RV–and more importantly, getting into and out of the gas station without hitting anything–felt like such a triumph. Setting it up at the campgrounds (admittedly with the help of a lovely 10-point checklist that my dad created for us) made me feel terribly competent. Sewer hose? Sure, I can do that! Oh, I screwed up a few times. The worst was when I scraped the side against a metal railing. Oops. It made a horrendous noise, but my dad scoffed at me when I pointed out the resulting scrape. Good thing RVs are tough.

Two other new things from vacation:

Yes, I put glitter on my fingernails. Well, I didn’t. A nice woman at a nail salon did. When I told her I was camping, she tried to talk me into some kind of gel polish that would apparently last for a really long time. I declined, because I was sort of infatuated with the idea of purple glitter, mostly because it seemed so wildly inappropriate for camping. But I didn’t want it to last for a long time. Two days seemed just fine. Once it was on, though, I was totally sold. My nails look ridiculous and I love them. I may become a purple glitter kind of person.

And the other new thing I did. I said after I got off that I never knew driving a tractor was on my bucket list, but oh, it was. Picking up the dirt and moving it around took me several tries–figuring out that scoop thing was not as easy as it looked–but it was so fun! Like playing in a giant-size sandbox.

Now that I’m home, it’s time to start writing again. I feel surprisingly uninspired, though. The combination of the house disaster, R’s college financial aid numbers and some unexpected vet & medical bills means that I’m stressing about money. I wish that motivated me, but instead it seems to stifle me. I think it’s because I know the economics of writing don’t make sense. I’d earn more at a minimum wage job. I read a blog post today that talked about the formula for success–which is apparently releasing a bunch of books at the same time, followed by another a month later, followed by another two months later. That’s how to keep visibility high and make your books discoverable. So let’s see, seven books… at my average speed, that’ll take me about four years. So four years from now, I might be successful. Unfortunately, I’ll be homeless and starving before then. That’s not good math.

But, hey, it was a nice vacation and I’m glad I took it despite the chaos. Tomorrow will be whatever it is, but yesterday–and the preceding eight days!–was a good day and I get to be glad that I had it.

I have been insanely unproductive for the past couple of weeks.

Here’s one reason why:

Squashed on a twin bed

With R home for summer, I’m sleeping and working on the daybed in my office. It should be fine, really. I moved lots of my stuff into the office, so that I didn’t have to continually go back into my bedroom to get clean clothes or stuff from the bathroom. But the dogs all think that the natural state of affairs is that they be on the bed with me. That’s, in order, Macie at the bottom, Zelda in the middle, Bartleby at the top. And my toes, squashed up against the side of the bedframe.

Plus the way in and out of the house is through my office. So when R comes home late at night and C goes out walking Macie in the morning, I get to greet both ends of the day. I’ve never found a shortage of sleep all that helpful when it comes to feeling creative and productive.

And then there’s this:

Today’s disaster

The office floor started seeping water Wednesday night. It was in the middle of an impressively torrential downpour so I thought it was weather-related which was pretty horrifying. I guess I can be glad that it was actually a leak in the refrigerator water line that had been slowly spreading under the kitchen tile, under the kitchen laminate, finally showing up when it reached the dining room. But I’m going to be spending the rest of my summer living in chaos, I suspect, and chaos is a lot easier when you’re well-rested.

I’m trying to be very zen. I’m saying a lot of Buddhist prayers. May I be healthy. May I be safe. May I believe in myself.

Last week’s book launch was disappointing. I gave away hundreds of review copies in advance so the lack of sales wasn’t actually unexpected, but since the hundreds of review copies didn’t translate into dozens of reviews, it’s looking like that was a bad strategy. Well, and that people aren’t responding well to the book, I suppose. So it goes. I still like it and that counts for a lot.

Put it all together, though, and I’m in the crawl-into-bed, pull-the-covers-over-my-head stage. Or I would be, if I had a bed of my own to crawl into.

I have a real vacation planned for next week: a road trip with R up to PA to visit relatives. But depending on how things go with the damage control guys over the next few days (who are currently drying out my kitchen with huge machines that are both noisy and heat-inducing, just what every Floridian wants to live with in midsummer), I don’t know whether I’ll be able to go or not.

Still, I remind myself, over and over again, that I’m having a better summer than other people I know. Joel, may you be happy. May you be safe. May you find hope. Barbara, may you be healthy. May you be strong. May you be comforted in your grief. Eric, may you find peace. May you find moments of joy. May you be comforted in your grief. It’s so sadly easy to think of people who need more prayers than I do.

One more prayer for me, though: may I sleep well tonight. And for you, too, just in case you need it as much as I do: may you sleep well tonight.

My title is the same as the first entry on my to-do list.

I am, at some point, going to figure out how to maintain a write-every-day schedule. It would be the most important thing I could do toward actually making life as an independent publisher/writer work. But somehow I haven’t convinced my brain to come along for that ride and beating myself up doesn’t seem to help. My writing subconscious is extremely stubborn. When it starts feeling put-upon, it just shuts down. But I’ve spent over three months in editor mode–polishing and proofing and trying to perfect–and trying to switch back to just letting the words and ideas flow hasn’t been happening.

So today: 500 words. It’s a small goal but I’m hoping that if I let my fingers loose a little, they’ll start moving. At this point, I don’t care what I write, as long as I write. I still have a few more elements of criteria-based content analysis to write about. If I can’t manage to make any fiction words work, I’m going to write long blog posts about anything that comes to mind, just to keep my fingers moving. Well, okay, maybe they won’t be blog posts if they wind up infinitely boring. But blog posts are my back-up plan to make sure that writing happens.

Summer always seems to go by so quickly. I feel like I’m incredibly busy, working hard, and then I realize I haven’t written a word in three days. Part of me wants to just say, “Relax, enjoy it, these days won’t come again,” and another part of me is anxious about what a bad entrepreneur I am. I need to find the fine line that lets me do both at once, and I’m pretty sure that line is best found by disconnecting from the internet. I do not wish to know how many hours a day I waste by checking my email & RSS feeds. Really, it would be a bad number.

Today, though, I’m going to be doing my first Facebook event, running (for me) from 12-3. I think I get to call that both goofing off and working, so yay. I’m also updating my blogs to include information about my new release. I’ve got A Lonely Magic scheduled to publish on July 10th. I’m sort of debating moving that up, because R comes home on July 8, and I think it would be nicer to be done with it before he arrives. I keep remembering little things I need to take care of before it actually releases, though. And the whole point of taking the time to do promotional stuff before letting it release was to actually do all that promotional stuff, not just decide at the last minute that I can’t be bothered!

I’ll be attending my first Facebook promotional event on Friday. The creator of the event emailed me a few weeks ago and asked if I’d like to participate and I said sure, without really knowing what I was getting into. I feel lucky that I did. He’s done some beautiful artwork for the occasion, including creating this incredibly cool image map, promoting all the books. Would that I was so organized!

I’m having a tough time getting started on any writing projects lately. Well, no, that’s not quite it. I’m having a tough time *finishing* any writing projects. I’ve got two short stories, a novella, and a book started, and I can’t seem to make progress on any of them. I flip back and forth, flounder for a while, put it away, and them miss a day or two while I pay attention to other projects.

Wash, rinse, repeat.

Part of it, I think, is that I feel very betwixt and between. I don’t feel finished with ALM. I need to let go of it, but instead I keep tweaking, keep questioning. I’ve resisted major changes but I keep stumbling over minor ideas. For example, bread is served at a meal, described as a crunchy Italian loaf. Wouldn’t it be more interesting if it were green? Made of some sort of seaweed flour? And yet later I have a green pastry made of seaweed and won’t that line become repetition if Fen has already eaten seaweed bread? It would be a little change that would ricochet down the line resulting in other changes. And I look at parts where I did make little changes and worry that the changes haven’t balanced correctly–Fen’s fear of hallucinations may be too strong in one place, too mild in another, for example.

Eventually, though, I’ve got to let it go. On the 26th I’m going to ask my mailing list if they want review copies and at that point, it has to be final. I wish I could figure out how to be productive with something other than ALM and its audiobook between now and then, though!