Getting real

The other day I received a sample back from an editor, and loved what she had to say. I loved it so much, in fact, that I booked her to edit my whole project. All day I was bouncing off the walls, so very, very excited.

Except then I got home, and sat down to compare her changes, I realized that I wanted to start this editing process all over again from page one. I have less than a month to go through it, and polish it as pretty as it's going to get, before she sees it.

What have I done?

And did I mention I'm trying to graduate in the next two weeks? That definitely doesn't add any pressure. I need to squeeze in some hours at work, too, while I'm at it. Noooo prooooblem!

I do this to myself, and I can't understand why. I set myself up with a bunch of individual expectations, which, taken on their own, are very reasonable. Sure, I can graduate...how hard can it be? I'm only taking two real classes this semester anyway. Oh, write a book? Well that shouldn't be too bad either. I mean, just those two classes right? I've had it rolling around in my head for a couple years now. How hard can it be?

Well, it's not hard, unless I've forgotten that there's only 24 hours in a day, and I am only one person.

I start graduate school this summer. Unlike much of the rest of the college going population, I am too old to just take the summer off and graduate later. I'm going to have a son looking at college in five years. I really can't be still playing this game when he gets going. So, I'm starting an intensive business core, with a two hour commute the first week of June. There's not going to be time for much besides this for the summer. I'm going to be lucky if I can take my editors work, and have a finished product before fall.

Intensive semesters are not new to me. When I went back to school, I did a year of Arabic in one semester, and it was brutal. I've had 16+ credit loads most of the time since then. Last semester, I spent the time in the great country of Jordan, trying to get half way fluent in Arabic. Stress is not new to me.

So I'm back to having to finish this main edit by the end of May.

I say this to remind myself that I always manage to come through. This is intense, but doable.

I got this.

Feeding the Muse

I must have been living deep under a rock to have never heard this expression, but there's a reason why people say it.  I think it captures the current state of my almost dead muse as I have pushed through the exhausting task of an intensive accounting class.  Nothing shrinks that poor muse into a shriveled unhappy raisin as the close and intimate interaction between me and a master budget sheet.  Even trying to look at it as a creative Sudoku puzzle didn't help me finally admit that perhaps numbers and I were not the friends we used to be.

I've not edited hardly at all this week, just trying to pass this class.  I miss my characters!

Mercifully, accounting finally is over.  In the last two days, I read one of the current Cinderella spins making the rounds these days.  Some of it I really loved, and other parts I didn't enjoy nearly as much.

What I was struck by most was my inability to just enjoy a novel because I didn't have to be me for a little bit and I could step into the shoes of someone else who had never even heard of accounting.  Oh, to be her.

Well not really.

If her life was cake, then I would probably not have much interest in it, so hurrah for her misery!

The most frustrating thing about my relaxing reading is that I can't seem to just enjoy a book without my mind catching on details that don't quite make sense.  I am finding myself unable to just let them float out of my mind unnoticed like they once used to.  I notice when a character is acting slightly out-of-character, and I'm constantly thinking to myself, why does this not work for me, and did I do that in my book?  Improving my craft is important, but I miss the joy of reading something without those annoying thoughts.

Whatever I didn't like about the book, it was good enough to make my muse full and happy.  I don't feel the stress I did, and now I can get back to work.  Reading, for me, is my muse's Thanksgiving dinner, and she is sitting fat and happy now.

Blank Pages

I'm sitting in the hospital with my 12 year old son.  He suffered a pretty serious dog bite, and so my husband and I have been waiting for stitches for the last 5 hours.

Two hours into this wait, I thought I'd work on my blog, but instead I just sat here and stared at a blank screen, my mind utterly empty of anything to say.  What a horrible day.

We have a couple dogs, and one was a rescue.  He has had a truly horrific life, and we got him when our other dog passed from complications of cancer.  He had awful allergies, was terribly underweight, and looked like he needed to put on a few pounds.  He helped us heal, and we felt like he was a member of the family.

A year ago, he snapped at one of my kids.  It wasn't a big deal, but it scared me.  He's a very big dog.  We really debated on what to do...it was that gray area of not horrible behavior, but definitely a warning sign.  We watched him, but I just wasn't sure what to do.  He didn't do it again.  In fact, he returned to the happy go lucky dog that we had come to love.

Fast forward a year.  I'm on the phone with my brother, and suddenly all I hear is screaming in that tone that sends every mother's blood cold.  There's screaming, and then there's screaming.  

My son fed him dinner.  The dog has never been food aggressive.  He gave no warning when my son pet him.  He just bit him.  He tore his nose almost in half, and deeply punctured his cheek.  Now, he's sitting in front of me with 15 stitches in his nose, and 5 in his cheek.  We're waiting for the Ear, Nose, and Throat doctor to come in to talk about the cartilage in his nose.  It seems it was damaged too, just as I suspected from the 5 hour nosebleed.  An inch higher and two inches to the left, he could have lost an eye.

So what did we do wrong?

When we got Bruce, we did not know he was abused.  According to his owners, they'd had him since he was a puppy.  However, a few months ago, our lab managed to break our fence and they ran off on a merry journey.  The dog catcher picked them up, and when we got them back, we found out about Bruce's painful past.

We are Bruce's fifth home.  Two of his previous homes starved him so badly that criminal prosecution was pursued.  It explained some of his neurotic tendencies  such as his freaking out if you walked by his crate with a stick.  He was deeply neurotic  always worrying, and expressing this by pacing constantly, and if you finally got him to just lay down and be still, he'd chew obsessively on his feet.

But he seemed ok! We had no warning that this would happen.

Yet, here's my son, possibly looking at reconstructive surgery for my decision to bring this dog into my home.  So what does this mean?

I really don't know.

Are all rescues a bad idea?  You never know what you're getting.  I am a testament to that.  Yet, there are so many dogs that have nothing but neglect as their past.  Even some abused dogs can get past it, and leave happy lives with their new families.  But is it worth the risk?  Would I do it again?  At least while I had children at home?  How about ever?

I don't know, and I feel like I'm saying I don't know a lot.

And what about Bruce?

I don't feel like this is Bruce's fault.  I lay that squarely at the feet of his previous abusers.  But he can't live in my house, no matter how much my injured son still wants him there.  Can I rehome him?  Even in a home that has no children?  I don't think so.  Even without kids, there's still neighborhoods, and those neighbor kids may get hurt.

But I love that dog.

Tomorrow, I'm going to do the painful task of taking this dog to McDonalds, and letting him have a bunch of cheeseburgers.  I'm going to tell him how much I love him, and hope that he feels like the best dog on the planet.  But then I'm going to take him to the vet, and hold him while they put him to sleep.  I hope that for at least a brief period in his life, he felt like he was loved, and that he was part of a family that loved him.  I hate what his abusers did to him, forcing me into this decision.  No one should have to kill their perfectly healthy, mostly happy best friend.

Wrestling the demon

You know how when you're stuck in a dream, doesn't even have to be a particularly bad one, and things are so foggy that you're really not 100% sure what is going on?  Some things are so random, and you find yourself asking why your daughter has decided today is the day to dance in the crawl space of your house, because two plus triangle equals green, and by the way, you only have sons.  Make sense?

And there you have editing.

I love, loved, LOVED writing the first draft.  Every moment felt like magic as the story unfolded in a private back room of my own mind.  Most everything I thought of seemed to just BELONG to this story.  I was king of the world last March when I wrote the last word.  I had a master piece.

But let's get real.  I was flinging a smattering of words on the page that held no art, no fire.  When I started editing, I realized that nothing I saw in my minds eye made it to the page, so I have basically had to write it - again.  I hear this is called editing.  Pretty sure this is torture.

I'm so grateful to my betareaders...because if it wasn't for their encouraging words, I'm not sure how I would have made it through this without becoming so dejected I finally gave up.  I am, as of today, half way through a thorough edit.  My own self imposed dead line looms in 9 short days, where I will have contracted with a professional editor to tear it apart again.

It's been a painful fight.  I've never rejected so much of myself so categorically, without remorse, only to reinvent new parts of me, again and again.

Still...I feel like I'm finally getting somewhere.  Could there finally be a light at the end of the tunnel?