Wrung Out

Some people can go-go-go all the time, and on the one hand I envy them.

But on the other hand I’m like, “When do you… you know… think?”

I need quiet in which to think.

These last few weeks have been nutsy-cuckoo this way. My only real peace has been writing, but I haven’t had nearly enough time to do that.  My in-box is stacking a mile high of stuff I must get done by tomorrow–and I don’t have any time today.

And all of the backlash I feared about Bobby Green when it came out waited until this week, when I’m so emotionally drained I’m afraid I don’t have the compassion with it that I should.

For the record–and for those of you who didn’t follow the blog tour, when I stated this explicitly: Reg’s sister, Veronica–her taste for politics and all–is based on people from my own life. I’m not saying this for pity, but for context. I don’t just write a V or a Keir or any other of the characters in my books with mental or physical difficulties because I think it would make a good story. I write them because in one capacity or another they have been part of my life, and thinking about them in fiction is more cathartic–and for me, more real–than thinking about them in terms of myself.

Anyway, when I’m this down to the bone, it’s usually best that I say nothing at all, because the thing I want to say, the thing closest to the surface, is the thing that will get me in the most trouble. (In this case it got me a petty review on amazon that I think I can deal with, but there was trouble!)

So I’m feeling a little wrung out. Last night I skipped blogging so I could write fiction–I was tired and it really was that choice. Turns out, I don’t get paid for blogging, so fiction it was.

Tonight, I may get them both done, and yay! I promised some more Pierce and Hal by tomorrow–which I’m excited to write, and a Happy Easter present it definitely would be, but we’ll have to see. I need a day… just a day. When my time is not monopolized by everybody else in my life, and I’m not sure if tomorrow’s gonna be that day. Chicken’s best friend from high school is coming over. Her mother is dying and Stevi is giving us two of her pets because they can’t care for them anymore. So tomorrow is going to be situating another cat in our garage (poor baby–I hope she’s okay there) and acclimating my dogs to Gibby, another dog of small stature, who will be living with us. So… not my day. And still nutsy-cuckoo, just like the last month.

I know it will calm down. I know walking the dogs will go back to being a quiet peace-giving wander instead of a frustrating, “This is as fast as I can go!” sprint. I know I will eventually get back into the pool on a regular basis.

But not tomorrow or the next day or the next or the next.

And maybe not the day after that.

But…

On the good side of things, one of my “go go go!” moments today was getting my kids from my mom after their trip to the ocean.

They’d had a wonderful time although they were both a little pink. (One of my stepmom’s biggest goals, apparently, is to cook one of my children well enough to eat. Big T has actual scars to attest to this fact, and Squish is going to have more freckles on her nose this year too.)

When I asked them what they did (in front of Grandma), ZoomBoy said, “Oh yeah! We ate androgynous crab! They tasted like butter.”

“How did you know they were androgynous?” I asked, perplexed. “Did you lift up their shells?”

“Dungeness crab!” my stepmom said, laughing. “And we could only boil three, so we chose those ones because they tasted buttery.“

I laughed. “So, ZoomBoy, did they taste buttery?”

“They tasted good,” he said, “but I still couldn’t catch one.”

But he got to try, and that’s pretty cool.

And I really needed the laugh.