I have time today.
I’m rolling into my last week of classes and thinking about how much I will enjoy not having this part of our schedule be a part of our schedule. For as much as I love my job and creating classes, I have not done a very good job of preserving or creating community in this space. I haven’t done that because of a number of reasons, but prime among them is the need to preserve and create space for the writing. That is going to remain my focus. This novel needs to get revised faster than it is getting done right now, and as I am closer to the point where I will need to conjure entire chapters from scratch (because of the 44, 16 will still work). I also am at a point in my life where I need to develop goals and plans (I have goals…) that I can achieve year to year without relying on the tenuous strands of professional relationships (like Shadowrun) that may have been ruined by recent bad writing.
In short, I gotta get my shit together.
What is holding me back? Me. Seriously. I have so much that I am trying to juggle that I am not doing anything particularly well. So, this off season is dedicated to locking in a solid life schedule and moving and pushing my life with my partner forward to that next level.
That next level always feels right around the corner. It always feels held back by our situation (two or three kids always living at home, jobs that don’t always have corresponding hours, too much drek on my plate). There has to be a moment when I stop working around the obstacles and shape the obstacles to work around us and what we have going on. A lot of why that doesn’t happen is parental guilt and feeling like putting them ahead of me is the way I ought to be doing things in life. However, even as I do that I know it isn’t right. The youngest is about to be 16. It’s our time now.
In short, I gotta set better boundaries so I can get my shit together.