Rain

More rain, today, and I do love the rain. Last night I turned off all the lights around nine o’clock, trundled off to bed with Fritz the Laptop, and wrote things while it was deliciously cold and wet and almost rainy. There were houses in the neighborhood who’d lit their wood fires, filling the air with a piney-smokey scent. It was…kinda awesome really. A deeply satisfying end to the evening, and one where I felt utterly justified in finishing my writing stint after hitting the thousand word goal I’d set myself.

Completely satisfying days at the keyboard come along so rarely that I celebrate them when they happen. My default state is…anger, I guess. Desperation. An incessant need to do more. Doing *enough* is a foreign concept. There is never enough, really, just nights where I feel like I’ve reached the outer borders.

This morning I’ve been plugging dates into calendars, marking off deadlines. I’m plugging in things I’d like to go do, writers festivals and gaming conventions and catch-ups with friends, many of which have been floating around my subconscious for months without me ever plugging them into a calendar and figuring out whether I can actually go to them, or I just think I can. I’ve been at it for an hour now, and I’m still nowhere near done.

I’m looking askance at things like, say, the Queensland Poetry Festival, trying to figure how much time I can spend there without utterly blowing the next Flotsam deadline (some, but less than I’d hoped), or whether I can afford to duck off to a second convention this year (nope), or indeed at any point inside the next year (maybe).

I’m looking at the things that need to be fit into the deadline calendar. Projects that…well, projects that I want to start. And projects that I want done. And projects that need to be done, but haven’t actually had to fit in for a while now.

There’s something enormously satisfying about the calendar. It’ll remain satisfying until it all goes wrong.