Texty

Six weeks into my summer sabbatical, and enjoying it, for the most part. Currently parked in the back yard on a lovely afternoon enjoying the fresh air and sunshine and birdsong and dragonflies and bumblebees. And my spiffy laptop and our awesome wireless. ;) There's something really calming about having my own green space to chill out in--at least when the weather's nice. Even enjoying doing a bit of tending of my little kitchen garden. This year, in addition to the herbs, we have tomatoes, two kinds of peppers, lemon cucumbers, yellow watermelon, Hubbard squash and raspberries, blueberries and strawberries. Oh, and a little tree that's supposed to produce something called a limequat. So far, the only thing that we've harvested is strawberries--the plant we have is very prolific--but we have tomatoes and peppers growing, the blueberry bush is absolutely bursting with stuff that should be ripening in the next few weeks, and everything else has at least flowered. Hoping there's enough summer left to get at least something out of most of them.

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I think I've gotten past the initial panic about not having enough time to do everything before I have to go back to work/start raising a youngun (more on that in a bit), so now I'm just taking it easy and doing what I want/need to do as the mood strikes me.

( Writing, family, kid-buying, blah blah )

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Gotta admit: I'm actually enjoying 40 so far. It's kind of like having a license to not give a shit what the world thinks anymore. Yeah, they still do care, but I'm out to pasture as far as the must-be-decorative pressure goes just based on age alone, so the rest of it doesn't matter as much. I think I've been a brassy old broad since I was 20. Nice to finally be the right age for it. :)

Hit the ground running as soon as we got back, and have barely had time to think, let alone properly sleep. It caught up with me Wednesday, and I ended up working from home--and doing rather awfully with it--due to sleep-deprived delirium. Conking out soon and plan to veg in the theater all day tomorrow with our massive DVR and Netflix backlog.

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The vacay reports (and there will be one last one when I remember to pull the remaining pics) are up for your perusal (scroll back a few entries.) Long story short if you don't want the slog: It was great, I loved it, but I don't think I'll be moving there. Like home better. :)

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Two more work weeks before I hit the end of my contract. There's a small chance of a few weeks' extension because one of my eds wants me around for Comic-Con coverage, but that probably won't happen. Technically, I have another four months before I have to take my mandatory break, and my agency might well find me something short for then, but honestly, I think I'd rather have the rest of the summer off. I need a chance to breathe and get my head back on correctly and do some of the big projects I've been putting off.

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One of said big projects is the adoption thing, though that's... sort of up in the air right now. ( Details )

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One thing we most likely will do in the meantime is get another kitten. It's been horribly empty being just a two-cat household since Fammy died, and poor, ancient Penny is getting pestered by Otter all the time because he's bored and lonely. But with me working, we didn't want to introduce a new furbaby without having someone around to mind it through the chaotic adjustment period. Free time for me, though, means kitten-sitting is possible, so we'll probably go shelter-crawling in the next few weeks. We considered a dog, but with the baby thing still a possibility, we didn't want to go that high-maintenance. So, kitten (or maybe even a 1-2 year old) it is.

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Feeling slightly maudlin about the end of my show in a couple of weeks. Likely to be the last series of it, unless its primary backer gets good ratings when it airs this series in January. Seems unlikely at this point. And even if it did come back, most of the cast I love might not come with it. So just two more episodes, and then I get to cry a lot. I have a ton of other stuff I love, of course (have really gotten into Game of Thrones in particular), but this is the first thing since LOTR that I've loved enough to join a fandom for, and the fandom itself has been great, too. It'll still exist after the show's gone, of course, but it won't be quite the same, and that concept breaks my heart. :(

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And on that depressing note, I'm done for the day. Hasta la pasta, and if you want more of me in the meantime, go stalk me on Twitter.

In a bit of a holding pattern right now, as I wait for various things to happen...

17 days until my surgery

Feeling slightly weird about that, since it's a definitely-never-getting-preggers thing. Also feels weird for other reasons. ( TMI )

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29 days until we leave for the UK invasion tour

Doing the final prep for it: buying new luggage, clothes and other sorts of supplies, and making sure we have maps and lists of stuff we wanna do. Downright giddy for it, though also nervous about various logistics issues (TSA, customs, schlepping luggage, driving, etc.) No word yet on whether any of my peeps are going to be at the con we're going to, but they haven't released guest lists at all, yet, so there's that. Also pinged one of the folks in question about it today. Not that he'll likely answer, the silly flake.


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40 days until I turn 40

Debating whether to throw some sort of bon voyage/damn I'm getting old/hooray for surgery party before we leave.

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5 months until M gets a big ol' raise.

The Company announced today that they're restructuring pay for most product-group folks, which includes the Mster. This is, of course, good news--never going to turn down additional money, especially with impending sprog expenses. But it's also kind of frustrating for me, because the amount of increase he's likely to get (raise + bonus) will probably be in the same vicinity as the amount I make each year (what with working 6-9 months/year.) Basically, his raise is going to make my working redundant. Yeah, I'll probably still work (after taking some time off for the new sprog) but it's still depressing to know that my 40-hour weeks are worth less than a quarter of M's. I work just as hard as he does and have far more education, but because my skillset isn't as rare as his, he gets the big bucks and I don't. Meh. Maybe someday I'll have a Real Career of some sort instead of just this boring button monkey shit. Disproportionate pay wouldn't matter so much if I was really doing something I love.

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21 days since I sent a query to an agent

The agent in question is pretty much the best person to pitch my novel to (in the kinds of stuff she's looking for), so I'm crossing my fingers. She supposedly responds to every query, so no news is probably somewhat good news in that she either a) hasn't gotten to it yet or b) hasn't rejected it out of hand. Not entirely sure what to do next if she does reject it, but no sense in dwelling on that now.

Looking forward to getting some feedback from my beta readers on it, too (and if you're not one and would like to be one, holla.)

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16 days since I posted any new fic (and more than a month since the one before that.)

After finishing the novel, my creative-writing jones has basically gone on holiday. I'm doodling a bit here and there--making tweaks to the novel as I think of them, and spitting out a few paragraphs on various fics--but otherwise, nada. The non-fiction muse seems to be in good order, as I finished off two big projects for work, and have written nine lengthy posts on the new semi-pro blog, but the completely-making-stuff up muse is AWOL. Hmph.

Part of this, I spose, is the post-partum novel thing. I'm holding my breath waiting to see what the world thinks of my new baby before I go breeding more. Also, the TMI stuff is making me somewhat disinclined to write naughty things, so there's that. I imagine I'll get back to it eventually--maybe when there's new series 5 stuff to perk me up again.

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5 hours since I last ate anything

Which prolly means I should go do something about that. Ciao for now.

Scalzi posted something recently about new writers trying to find the time to write with busy schedules, parenting, etc. The gist of his advice was this: If you really want to be a writer, you find time to write. The obvious extension of this idea is that if you really want something, you find a way to make it happen. (Obviously, taking into account actually insurmountable limitations.)

This idea has been gnawing at me the last several days--the idea that if I don't have some of the things I want, yet (a proper career, a kid, etc.) then I must not really want them that badly because I haven't found a way to make them happen.

Only... I don't think that's actually true. It may be true that I haven't put massive effort into certain things, but it's not that I don't want them. It's that I'm afraid of putting in all that effort and coming up short anyway. Because that's happened to me so many times I no longer have any confidence that hard work/sacrifice is always or even most of the time going to pay off.

( A couple of examples )

I'm absolutely willing to put in quite a bit of effort if I have some sense that doing so will give me at least some semblance of the results I want. The uprooting thing, for instance. I worked my ass off to make that happen because I knew that there was a good chance it would. And, well, a year later, here we are, happy as little clams in our new pad. Same thing with my last degree. Spending $30k and living in B'ham for almost two years wasn't exactly easy, but I knew I could do it, and at the end of it, I have a pretty little certificate hanging on my wall and a far greater earning potential than I would've had otherwise.

Yet if I'm not certain, or don't think I have at least a fighting chance to reach my goal? Then no. No matter how much I may want something, if I don't have at least some confidence that the odds are in my favor, I just can't see blowing that much time and energy on it.

It may break my heart--and does, to an extremely painful degree--that I wasn't able to put together an opera career, but once I realized that no matter how good I was, it wasn't good enough because I didn't have the right pedigree, I gave up. Likewise, I dropped my music degree at the very end of it because there was no physical way possible for me to pass the keyboard competency part of it. I wanted those things. Really, really, really wanted them, but it eventually became clear that wanting and working at them wasn't going to be enough, so I had to let them go and move on to a career in which I had a fighting chance.

I sincerely believe that hard work is necessary to reach most goals. Some folks are born with privilege such that they don't have to work as hard as others, and that sucks. Level playing fields would be nice. But aside from that, yeah, all of us need to put in some effort. However, I really dislike the implication that if we don't have something we want, it's just because we don't want it enough to work at it.

The truth of life is that, even beyond hard limitations outside our control, often the effort required to reach a goal is far, far out of proportion with the chances of getting there, and with the benefits of that goal. At some point, you have to ask yourself whether what you want is really worth the massive outlays of time, money and energy necessary to get it.* And just because someone isn't willing to torture themselves like that for something doesn't mean they're lazy or don't "really" want it. It just means that they've made sensible choices of what to do with their resources and have decided that those resources are better spent on something else.

Pursuing a dream is all well and good and sounds romantic, but reality and responsible adulthood aren't often compatible with that pursuit. A person who acknowledges that reality and responsibility isn't a lesser being for having done so.

And yes, I'm musing over that question a lot these days wrt the adoption.

Thinking a bit more about the adoption thing, one issue has been nagging at me: Is it really fair to bring a child into a family of only two people?

M and I have a great deal of love to give, and would be very dedicated to any child we took in, but neither of us have great relationships with our families of origin. In fact, I can't think of anyone I'm biologically or legally related to with whom I actually have a close, loving relationship. I get a few birthday cards here and there, but really, those people don't actually know me, and wouldn't like me if they did. So... No.

We do have some good friends, of course. I consider D and K to be family, definitely, and there are plenty more people we love whom we'd readily add to that list if we got closer, but for capital-F Family--people we could be certain would be in our child's life for the long haul--it really is just us.

The popular concept of family--the dozen or so people gathered around at Thanksgiving or whatever--just isn't a part of our lives, and won't be. We've already lost all of our grandparents, so our child would never know great-grandparents, but they wouldn't know grandparents, either, except in passing. No aunts, no uncles, no cousins. They'd meet a few, sure--M's siblings, for instance, wouldn't be unknown to them--but they'd really be little more than strangers, not people with whom they'd really be close. On a day-to-day basis, we'd be it.

On a practical level, I don't see this getting in the way too much. Yeah, most birth mothers would probably prefer to give their babies to couples with a larger family, but I'm sure there might be some who wouldn't worry about that. The only issue is just my own concern with it, and whether we'd be emotionally shortchanging a child by having such a small circle of loved ones for them to come home to.