Settling
Came home last night from RWA with a remarkable clarity of mind around the direction I want to go this year. I definitely experienced my usual round of conference angst and the wish that this past year had been more productive, but Nationals also always allows my to see my priorities more clearly. Every year I experience a muddying and obscuring of my goals over time. The conference–this year especially–allows all that silt to precipitate away to the bottom, and I can once again see where I want to go.
The takeaway? One cannot raise two small people, work a day job that demands all of one’s mental energy and write a book. Perhaps if my day-job were less mentally encroaching, my routine of getting up in the wee hours would be do-able, but that is not my reality. I must credit this realization in no small part to a conversation I had with Joanna Bourne at the booksigning. (Thank you, Joanna, and congratulation on the very well-deserved RITA!) It’s such an obvious truth that all of my best mental energy is poured into professional demands and not the writing. Now I see it.
I wish I could say the same for our poor betta fish, Miss Flitter Silver-Mist Phipps, whose tank is a nasty murk. Cleaning the fishtank was NOT a priority for the DH during my absence, so I’m to share some of my clear-sightedness with dear Flitter.