Getting there

This is what I looked like the minute I got home from Disneyland last Thursday, minus the whiskers.

It was the end of two months of insanity that started in mid-April.  In between then and now I had visitors to LA, covered three travel events, visited two other countries, which included my first visit home, and saw a bajillion people.  Yes, you read that correctly, a BAJILLION!  And all of it culminated last week as I raced down Route 66 at 7:00 a.m without coffee or breakfast, while cars smiled and spoke to me and winked.    

And as you know, I've got eight chapters left to write of this #@#$%# draft.  And boy does it feel like that kind of draft today!  I've spent the last three days just getting my head back into it.  And you know what, this @#^&#*# draft has some coherency, I must admit.  It's terribly over written, but that's fixable, right?

Now I'm giving myself a deadline to get these next eight chapters done (a secret source told me it will really only be seven chapters but we'll see how that goes).

I'm revealing this deadline to the world so someone out there will banish me to the darkest, coldest place beyond The Wall of the Seven Kingdoms (yes, I'm reading Game of Thrones) if I don't make it.  Do you think someone will do that for me?  If so, my deadline is July 6th.

Of course, as usual, I spent a good chunk of my time today beating myself up for dilly-dallying in chapters already written and wondering if the villain in my novel should in fact be a dragon (damn you Game of Thrones!).

BUT even after all that, I have started writing again.  I AM getting there.  And I will get there.  On July 6th.

As for all the other things going Lightening McQueen through my busy mind, like how I'd really enjoy a larger income, how I really want to do a five-day juice cleanse, get some more writing gigs, loose ten pounds and run and do yoga every single day, meditate, decorate my apartment, go to New York with my sisters to see the Newsies on broadway, and visit Thailand, and all of this in 2012 (This is the year, isn't it?).  Well, I'll just have to put that all aside for now and do the only thing I can do, what I've been telling myself over and over and so will again here and now:  Trust the process of life, be grateful for it.

Canada Bound and Neil Gaiman

Tonight I am on my way back to Toronto.  I am so excited and already really feeling a little bit overwhelmed but I am mostly very excited.  I haven't seen my mother in almost eight months, which is the longest we've ever gone without seeing each other and has only happened one other time (when I was going to school in Vancouver).

I do not like being away from my family and though the extra time to myself I have in LA may be helping me to get writing done, in a perfect world I would be living in Toronto, getting paid to write what I love, and enough so that I could live comfortably with Tom, and whoever else should come along.  That could still happen.  But for now, it's still a dream.

Neil Gaiman had something fabulous to say about dreams recently, when he addressed the University of the Arts in Philidelphia.  I suggest that you watch this video of his speech.  If you're an artist of any kind, perhaps not even producing but with art in your spirit, then this is for you.  It's nineteen minutes of your life, but well spent when you consider some of the other, more wasteful things you've done with nineteen minutes of your time.  When I'm sad and wish my family were nearer, when I have my "I'm not going fast enough" moments about my novel writing, Gaiman reminds me to use it.  It's something I prescribed to long ago.  For this is how we, as Gaiman puts it, "make good art."

As a side note, I love the bit in here about how he lied about his writing credentials to get his first job in journalism.  I wish I would have had the balls to do something like that when I was starting out!

And speaking about "not going fast enough" with my novel.  I'm eight chapters away from finishing the rewrites of Book One.  When I get back from Toronto I plan to be done them in no more than two weeks.  Then it's off to be read, by people, for the first time all the way through.  I'm both excited an terrified.  For now though, I love this book I'm writing and I just hope I can do right by it.  Maybe one day you'll get to read it and hopefully you'll think I have done.