There are days when the panic sets in so hard that I can barely think.  When every setback feels like the end.  When the fact that I don't know what I'm doing comes around and smacks me full in the face.

Some days, being an artist living with another artist is so damn hard.

(I'm grateful for it anyway.)

Things have been going slowly, and yet quickly. I've been writing every day (okay, I slacked off this weekend. But I'm back with it now) and the book is going well. It's a mess, but it's a first-draft mess, so that's okay. I'm having to hold back to keep from pushing myself to do more than I set as the goal, but I don't want to end up frustrated with the book.

I've also been having adventures in cooking. I've become mildly obsessed with learning to make things with what I already have in my kitchen, and with using the random things I've a acquired in the last month. Recent experiments have included fruit smoothies, peach milkshakes, and pasta salad, all of which turned out really good. (I've always wanted to know how to make that italian pasta salad you can buy at grocery store delis. It's one of my favorite foods, but it's too expensive to buy often. It turned out to be really easy and cheap to make, so yay.) It's nice to actually have time to mess around in my kitchen and see what comes out of it.

Today I got it into my head that I wanted to read Feed (by M.T. Anderson) to Drew while he worked. I knew I loved that book, but I'd forgotten just how brilliant it was. We're about halfway through it (it's not that long, but my voice hurts.) I've also been reading Kitty and the Silver Bullet (really amazing it's lasted so long without being read) and LOVING IT.

My life is boring, but that's okay. I needed the break. It's raining today and we took a break to take a walk in the rain...but now I need to get to work and get my writing done. *sigh*

I went running today for the first time in like a year. I discovered that my muscles are in great shape. My body feels like it could just run and run and run. My lungs, however, protest. I can't run very long at all without feeling like I can't breathe. I think this is a function of being completely aerobically out of shape. My heart rate is way too fast. This is okay, because it gives me something to work on. I need to do more running/other aerobic exercise, so I can get back in shape.

I like to run in the spring, because it gets me out in the sun for half an hour, at least. That's wonderful. It'll get harder as it gets hotter, but I think it'll be good for my health to keep going.

I've set my writing goal at 1000 words per day for the rest of April and the month of May. This is a nice, sustainable amount which will allow me to get the book done by the end of May, while practicing being a steady writer rather than a binge writer. The fact is I write enough as a binge writer to be fine professionally, but my writing won't continue to fit into my life once I have children if I can only get things done in large chunks. (Thanks, Emily, for making me think about this.)

So I'm practicing being a steady, a-little-everyday writer. Besides, I did the math. If I did 1000 words a day six months out of the year, I could write two books a year and still have a whole six months for revision. This makes the whole thing look not-so-hard, if I can just get in the groove of doing a bit every day. It worked VERY well with my RT revision, so I figure I can learn to write that way too if I practice long enough.

Also, with my new revision skills, it's okay if my 1000 words are bad, because everything is going to be rewritten anyway. It's happy when I figure out a process that works.

Also, with my 1000 words done today, I don't have to constantly feel like I ought to be working. That's happy. With my new-found freedom I spent some time photographing Drew's new project and getting the photos ready to post.

Life is happier when I get to work on stuff I love.

Switching projects always sucks. The first day I do a lot of staring at the screen forming sentences which suck and which will absolutely have to be rewritten later. But if I don't ever put in the time for the bad days, I won't ever get in the swing of the piece and be able to write good stuff.

Today I banged out three pages. They suck. But I'll get into it eventually.

And I'm excited about this project, too. Grr.

The Royal Tongue revision is finished...ish. I finally got that beast of a final chapter rewritten...again. It's terrible. Characters drop in and out. Much of what happens isn't written in a way that makes sense. I'll come back to it in a few weeks and rewrite it (when I can fit it in my brain again) and then I'll workshop it and rewrite it again. *sigh*

Then with the rest of my workday I've worked on the outline of keepers, making a few tweaks and getting ready to start writing again tomorrow. Once I finish that book it'll be up for a huge rewrite. (Ever rewriting...ever rewriting.) I already know many things that need to change, but I want to get the rest of the book down first so I can have a final shape to sculpt it towards.

This is all so much WORK. It's a good thing I love my job. (And I must, since I do all this work and I still don't get paid.)

My brain decided to quit on me. I cannot form a coherent sentence, which means I cannot finish my revision tonight. This is not fair.

I did get an intense amount of work done. I read the whole book out loud to Drew yesterday (about 13 hours of work including breaks) and I'm really pleased with it. Today I wrote all the missing epigraphs, some of which required quite a lot of thought, and got down a detailed outline of the final chapter (finally). So I shouldn't feel like a slacker. But I don't like being late on my deadlines--especially when they are with myself.

Oh well. I need a day off (tomorrow) and then I'll write the chapter on Monday. I'll just have to be satisfied with being one day late.

Today I'm doing a read through of the Royal Tongue. This is all I have left in the revision, aside from the writing of the final chapter, which will occur tomorrow, so I can go back to Keepers on Monday.

Doing a read through consists of reading the entire book aloud to Drew while he sculpts. He then critiques for me the changes I've made, suggests sentences that need to be tweaked, and helps me decide if I've actually fixed the problems from the last draft.

We've gotten through the first fifty pages, and I've realized something. (Besides that my throat hurts, and that this is going to be a very long workday.) This is a GREAT fifty pages. Finally. After all the work I had to put into it, it at least has a solid three chapters which are great. I'm not sure if the rest of the book will be this good, but I now have confidence I can make it this good.

Happy, happy day.

Today is the very last day of classes. I don't have any finals (aside from the party for my writing class during the final time) and the final I'm proctoring consists of showing up, directing it, and then grading the finals for about an hour. Effectively, I'm done with my semester at 1:20 today. Hooray!

I'm scrambling to finish my revision of RT by the end of this week so I can get back to writing Keepers next week. Today I am jazzed about both projects, which is good. Yesterday was a wash, as I couldn't bring myself to concentrate on any of it.

It's sunny and warm again today, but it's supposed to snow tomorrow, which doesn't make me happy. Can't it just be spring and be done already?

It's bright and sunny today, and flowers are blooming--daffodils most especially. The trees have buds on them. There's a wind coming from the south to keep it from getting too hot. I sat in the sun and the breeze for an hour, and took a walk. So lovely.

My friends who are moving to Japan (!!! I am so happy for them.) gave us a ton of food that they can't store or take with them--which is wonderful. Our food budget is our second highest monthly bill, and now we're stalked up on a bunch of things for a while, which is wonderful. I'm so grateful to them, though I feel bad they aren't able to use it themselves.

Also, I'm done grading for the semester, except for the finals, which take a grand total of about an hour to grade, because they're short. :) Hooray.

Also, I stayed up way too late last night reading the last Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants book. Those are amazing reads; very serious looks into teen issues, despite the silliness of the title. I loved these books and I'm sorry there aren't any more, and I'm not really a big sequels person.

Also, I'm done with all my extraneous tasks for a while (only took me two weeks--there were a lot of them piled up) so I can get back to my revision. I'm hoping to have the full revision of the Royal Tongue wrapped up by the end of the week so that I can get back to writing my thesis next week.

Off to work.

Having kids terrifies me, because I'm afraid it will be the end of everything I've worked for. I've spent years and years getting myself where I am career-wise. If I were asked to give it up, I would. But instead I'm being asked to do both, simultaneously. That terrifies me more than giving it up. How on earth will I ever figure out how to do both those things without shorting either of them? (Not to mention still being a wife, a friend, and a business partner for Drew's stuff.) I just don't know.

I think the first step for me is getting rid of the "student" and "teacher" roles. They take up too much time, energy, and brainspace. Without those, I would have a large space in my life that I think I could put children into and not have to give up the "writer" and "business partner" roles. But maybe I'm just naive. Maybe there just won't be enough space, and then I will fail, because I will not be doing all the things I have been asked to do--which, for better for worse, are also all things I feel passionately about doing.

I have the lucky benefit that the "wife" and "business partner" roles are filled with lots of the things I would do for fun anyway--playing chess, and warmachine, and roleplaying, and watching high-art films, and reading, and critiquing Drew's painting and sculpting, and taking photos, and playing around in photoshop and organizing. (Yes, I organize for fun. I'm sick. I know it.) So that should do a decent job of keeping "me" from getting lost. I married a guy with my same tastes and interests, so spending time with him is keeping up on my own interests and activities, which is nice. Also, the "friend" role is inextricable from the "business" role, because about half of my friends are writers or my advanced readers.

And this is all assuming that we can actually live off our careers, for which all the evidence to the positive is spiritual, not empirical.

*AHHHH* I just don't know how this is all going to work out.

I am hating the ending of The Royal Tongue. I have all these ideas swimming around, but I'm not sure how to express them in a cohesive chapter. I think this is going to be bad going down the first time, but if I don't get it down the first time, then I can't make it better.

I've already written three bad endings to this book. I've paid my dues, man!

Oh well.

I'm taking a break from The Royal Tongue revision to read manuscripts that have been piling up waiting for my criticism. I have three that I feel particularly bad about not making time for. I printed two of them this morning and ran out of paper, so I'm going to get the other one printed tomorrow. I'm hoping to make it through all three of them in the next few days, and then go back to charging through my revision. (Also, grading papers next week. Yuck.)

Luckily for me, the manuscripts are all quite good. So reading them is fun. I have to remind myself that critiquing my friends' work is actually part of my job (in barter for all that wonderful criticism they give me) so I can do the fun reading, comment, and still feel like I've accomplished something important.

And now back to reading about dead mice.

Hooray! At 60,000 words I am finally finished rewriting material from The Royal Tongue. I now need to completely rewrite the final chapter from scratch (not ending the same way at all anymore) and then I can move on to something else.

(Still need to decide if I want to revise what's written of Keepers, finish writing Keepers, or revise Haylee's journal next, because those are the projects for the next four months.)

Happy, happy, happy.

My head is very, very fuzzy. Today I revised 50 pages of The Royal Tongue. When I decided I could work on that no more, I designed three banners for Garden Ninja advertising.

Drew: So, when you took a break from working, you did more work.
Me: Shut up.

All in all it was a fantastic day. Too bad I can't think straight now that it's over.

I'm going to go watch Angel and turn my mind off.

We've got a banner up at the Dragon's Keep website now.  (Might have to refresh a couple times to see it; it appears in the top right corner.)

Levi (the owner) has been awesome to us and is going to let us hang up display cases and banners in the store.  This means I get to play with photoshop some more.  (Since Drew needs to be sculpting and I like photoshop, I get the banner-making job, at least for the image production part.)  Isaac is awesome to us, and he helped us convert a little drawing of a ninja that he did for me a while ago into a logo that we can use on the banners, on the site, on images, and on future business cards.  It looks fantastic.  I'll post it eventually, once I get the PNG files turned into something smaller and more postable.

The sculpting project Drew's working on is turning out AWESOME.  Neither of us expected that he was capable of sculpting something so good for his first from-scratch mini.  It's very, very encouraging for the future of the business.  Things are building slowly, but that's the way we need it, since we're both still in school and can't devote full time attention to the artistic pursuits just yet.

But I'm very happy with the way it's all going.

My revision is rocking.  I'm into chapter fifteen now (only four more to go) and just it 50,000 words.  I'm having to restrain myself from changing the middle of the book too much--if I were to write book now, I would do it differently, but I'm not writing the book over.  I'm just rewriting what's already there.  Which means I'm making large changes, but not so large that I'm allowed to spend the next three months replotting and rewriting the middle.  I just don't have that kind of time.  It's not terrible as is, so I think it'll be okay.

I like the book again, anyway, which is a huge accomplishment.  We'll see how the ending goes.  I've blown through 18 pages so far today, and I'd like to get through another 30 before I have to quit.

Off to work.

I've now rewritten over 41,000 words, which is about two-thirds of The Royal Tongue. And it's working much better.

*does happy dance*

The book I am revising is much better going this time than when I wrote it. I think that's largely because I'm a better writer now than I was when I wrote this book.

There are books I won't go back and revise, because there just aren't enough elements about them that I'm excited about to go back to. Those stay in the files forever, doomed to remain practice novels.

There are other books that are almost there. These are the books I'm reworking. I can make them work now, because I know more now than I did then.

I'm learning a lot from the revisions, too. I hope when I go back to writing new projects I'll be better at writing the books the first time, because I'll understand more about novel structure and exposition and a slew of other things.

But then, maybe I could write a new novel now, and it would be better, and I wouldn't need to do all this heavy revision. I'm trying to learn these skills revamping old books, but maybe I could do the same thing working on a new project. Maybe it could even come out better.

Then again, the revisions are MUCH faster than writing a new book. The full rewrite of The Royal Tongue is looking like it's going to take two months in all. I can't write a book in under six months. So that means I can rewrite three books this extensively in the time I could write one new one. And that I'll have three things to send out, rather than one. That's why I'm doing this--to have the books I've written ready to send out.

But then, maybe my brand-new books would be much better. (Indeed, the book I'm in the middle of has gotten MUCH better reception than former novels.) So maybe I'm wasting my time trying to get these earlier books into shape.

Maybe I think too much.

*goes off to ponder these grievous thoughts*

Done!

Starting page length of material: 32
Page length of revised material: 36
Words written today: 7,787
Total word count: 32,522
Hours worked: 5.5

Happy, happy, happy.

Hours left: 2.5
Pages left: 10

Total word count of revised manuscript: 30,380

I hit the halfway point in the novel! Yay!!!

Chapters revised: 1
Pages to go: 20
Hours left to work today: 4.5