Can you believe it? I’ve hit my target, and it’s only the middle of the afternoon!

Photo credit: Erwan Hesry on Unsplash

If we lived in a perfect world, I could devote the entire weekend to working on my book. Alas, the world is imperfect. The house is in desperate need of cleaning, errands need to be run, I have to take dinner to Mom both tonight and tomorrow night since my sister leaves tomorrow for a business trip to Iceland (don’t get me started on her efforts to micromanage how I do this), and billable work needs to be done since I’ve run the calculations for how much extra money my recent appendectomy is going to cost out of pocket, and It Ain’t Good. (Especially since this year is already proving to be expensive with Ned’s chemo, the house in desperate need of painting, my formerly trusty car requiring many pricey repairs over the past few months, and my even more desperate need for new glasses.)

All of which means that the timing of the #1000wordsofsummer challenge is especially perfect, because it forces me to carve out time and space now to address some of the major flaws in the book. Not that there aren’t other issues, but these flaws required the creation of new material which I kept putting off—and that’s precisely what writing 14,000 words will accomplish. It may be not that all these words will be keepers, but at least I now know what’s filling those gaps. They’re like literary spackle.

There will still be much to do after I’ve edited the new material and figured out just where to slip it into the existing text (which, by the way, still needs significant editing, both developmentally and line by line). Which is yet another reason it would be nice to be independently wealthy, i.e., so I could spend my weekdays working on the book as well as evenings and weekends. But you play the hand you’re dealt, and somehow, everything works out. Maybe not in manner or timeframe you intended, but sooner or later, it does work.

At least, that’s been my experience so far. Here’s to hoping it continues.