In the middle of everything (again)

I’ve been revising a novel these past few months. I assign myself a few short chapters each week. I usually aim to keep one workday as open as possible in the middle of the week so I can get into a fiction headspace and not be thinking about any calls or meetings coming up. I do the more remunerative aspects of my business on other days.

Anyway, today was novel day. I was excited to dive into my manuscript and…it was also the day that a lot of other stuff seemed to be happening at the house. Let’s just say the doorbell rang several times, stuff needed to be tracked down, various things needed to be delivered to the right places, and then it turned out that a child had forgotten a school laptop at home and desperately needed it by 10:30 a.m.

So…a lot going on. As I’ve written numerous times on this blog, sometimes I fantasize about a cabin in the woods where I would work uninterrupted. But I will take a writing retreat this summer to finish my edits; this current round is about getting the manuscript into a state where it is close enough to finished that an immersion in it is helpful. Everything did quiet down reasonably after 10:30 a.m. or so and I was able to work through the chapters. Later in the book it’s a lighter lift — as I’d more figured out characters by that point in the original writing, and I am keeping most of the later plot points from earlier iterations. The biggest change today was probably deleting a whole section. That I could do even with the leaf blowers going.

I do wait for reasonable conditions (see: the open day) but if I waited for perfect conditions I’d never get anything done. As I do want to write this story, waiting for perfect isn’t an option. Maybe someone reading the novel will think “hmm, it really feels like she was writing that section with a leaf blower going outside.” But we shall see!