 |
| Another fall rolls around with Domino |
I've been working on a post for a while about the events of our summer. The main purposes of this blog are to stay on some sort of writing schedule (and this month's deadline is upon us in a matter of hours), and to document for myself basic family events and milestones. I will still finish my summer catch-up post, but not before the stroke of midnight this Halloween, so I offer up these thoughts in the meantime.
I am increasingly astonished as I get older how fast time slips away. This isn't surprising to anyone, certainly, but I'm thinking about it in terms of how some days seem over before they've even begun.
For instance, all I really want to do lately is work in my new shop space. We moved my violin making shop into the former teaching space in the back of the store, and it's wonderful. I have so much room and better access to everything I need, and when I'm in it, I don't want to leave. I started two instruments, and I'm at the point where I can begin shaping blocks. I'm excited to do that.
However, I have not had the chance to sit at my desk and do that for several days. It's frustrating. I find myself lying in bed in the morning, figuring out what's ahead, and being sad that getting to my desk is unlikely because all of my time already seems spoken for. Yesterday I had to factor in dog walks, a trip to the gym and a shower, deciding on some kind of lunch for later, repair work at my bench, errands to three different stores, and customer appointments that ran into the evening. I knew all of that was ahead before I got up, and felt like the day was gone before I got out from under the covers.
I love my life. If I were unaware of the state of the world, I would say everything is really good at the moment. I liked everything I did yesterday. I liked everything I did today.
The problem with projects that can be easily pushed back little by little, is they begin to feel like a mirage. I find myself looking up from my daily routine and responsibilities at a distant oasis I may never reach.
My writing projects are the biggest example of this problem. They are not necessary to pay the bills or to meet obligations to others. They are important to me, but are only on deadlines of my own imagining. The dog needing a walk can't be put off. Rehairing a bow for someone who needs it before their next rehearsal makes specific demands on my time. But my novels? The followup to my violin book? The only timelines for working on those are entirely made up.
As a result, a day easily slips by without doing that work. What's one day? I'm a busy person. Of course I didn't get to my edits today, because there are so many other things that have to come first. But then that quietly becomes every day.
Last summer I hired an editor to go through the next novel I would like to publish. This one I think has more commercial potential than the other things I've written, and I've decided to make a concerted effort toward traditional publication. If it doesn't happen, that's fine, but I just want to make the attempt so I don't regret in the future that I didn't take a real shot at a wider audience for my fiction. A writer friend recommended a lovely editor, she made suggestions, and under different circumstances I should have been able to do my rewrites in under a week because when I have clear direction, I am a fast writer. But the format of the editor's comments are awkward for me because I like to work from such things in a hard copy and all of this was digital, etc. etc. The upshot is, sorting out what I need to do is just painful enough that it keeps getting pushed back. One more day.
Then all of a sudden I look up and the days have piled into over a year. I have not touched this book in so long it's embarrassing, not to mention frustrating.
That's what happens in my violin building shop, too. Although I do have two people expecting instruments on some kind of promised timeline, so at some point panic will set in and I will start scheduling time at my desk again, rather than letting it all get used up in the front of the shop where the repairs never end.
But no one is waiting on my book except in only the most vague of terms. So any urgency about finishing it has to come from me.
Which is why I set up a writing retreat this coming week where I can be in a house in the woods with my dog and a fellow writer (who also has a project to finish), and we'll have a fire, snacks, and no internet. My plan is to buckle down and finish this book. And that apparently can't happen in my regular life where time is slippery and days follow days and writing ends up out of reach.
Who knows? I might be so productive I finish my novel edits early and can complete that other blog post. It could happen.
