Briefly, I bemoan

Ambition is a hell of a drug, kids.

It's been much longer than I anticipated since I wrote anything here (slash any non-fiction) and there are reasons for that. Some of those reasons are the result of my own hubris, and some are the result of Life Happening.

First, the good (-ish) stuff: I spent a large part of January, plus all of February, grinding hard to finish my first revision on the novel-in-progress., because I'd committed to a March 1st date to send it to beta readers for critique.

That's the part that was too ambitious.

I did it, but I did very little else. It was hard, and I regretted not picking a later date, but I'm really happy with where that draft ended up, and I think the next revision will really polish it up.

"But –" you may think, "that was over a month ago. What happened to all of March?"

That's the part with Life in it.

Toddler sleep regressions, a new baby, and a partner with a broken foot sums to zero words written, of any kind. And as hard as I worked for the first two months of the year, and as creatively exhausted as I was afterwards, the last four weeks of not writing at all have been much harder. Not because of the toddler meltdowns, but because my creative cup was empty to start with, and I haven't been able to fill it. Writing brings me so much joy, and helps remind me that I'm a three-dimensional person when I start to flatten out into a paper cutout of a full-time-job + parent. Absent writing, I've been rolled flat.

But, finally, I was able to get the kid to sleep only half an hour late (compare to the last month's average of ninety minutes late). And that's all it takes – one little hour back, and I can start to (slowly, probably painfully) re-inflate. I can start to plan out my revisions and tap out a blog post and go to sleep feeling just a bit more like myself.

Sometimes getting back on the wagon is the difficult part, but sometimes it's just the being off that's hard.

Ok, I've complained enough for one blog post. Time to get back to writing.