Tales from Beyond

Holy cats, people.
There's cause to celebrate in my corner of the Interwebs.
I have been trying and trying and trying to get my head above water in this new phase in my life, and mostly failing.
If I were to type one more time "I need to write here more often" even I would punch me in the face.

Here's some duh moments I'd like to share with you, my friends and associates:

1. Moving sucks, and it takes a while to figure out new digs. A while can be up to a year. I've lived with the SO for ohhhh....a tad bit over that. And every so often I'm a slow learner.

2. Long term, committed relationships are hard. I mean, they're good too, or you wouldn't think they'd be as much a phenomenon as they are, but yeah. They're really difficult. This is only compounded by family with medical issues, roommates and old houses with yards and gardens and things.

3. But I didn't know the first thing about how to make stubborn rose bushes bloom or fix a sink or paint a room or fix a sink again. Or how much it takes just to run a house week to week, from dishes to meal planning and taxes and budgets and appointments and groceries. And pets.

4. Freelance writing is...tumultuous. No matter how hard you work or how long, it's really hard to make it into a living, and even harder to ride out mergers and layoffs and freezes. One minute you're in, the next you're out. Things change fast and there's so much work you have to put in to get anything out of it. Most people I know in paid writing positions around me put in at least 5 to 7 years of unpaid or occasionally paid work at various outlets before they ever got those.  Seems the fate of the creative. Everyone wants photos and articles and stuff for free, but no one's telling a steelworker to put in their unpaid dues for 7 years and one day they'll make it. But I digress.

5. You better work, b*tch. No one is doing anything for you, and if you want to make stuff happen you're gonna have to pound pavement, send emails, and constantly find a new way of making it. And boohoo if you don't start May 1st on a Monday. May 2nd on a Tuesday or halfway between Tuesday and Wednesday is fine, just start. Not starting isn't an excuse for not starting. I...am queen of not starting. I regret this, and wish to give up my claim to that throne.

So...where's that leave us? Why the celebration?
Well, I've come up for air. I'm learning the routine, and making space for things I should have made space for a long time ago.

Third Coast is developing and changing and I've got a front seat and a say in how that happens. I'm really excited to watch us grow and help us get our name out there.

The SO has been brought on as a writer for Third Coast officially, which is reason enough to celebrate, but we're both launching our writing ship together, and have set up a schedule we are currently completing day one of.

I feel amazing. We got up, we procrastinated only a minimum amount to go acquire coffee, and then we worked. And I really, really got shit done. While making sure house stuff like bills and utilities didn't slip away, while ensuring animals and people were fed, while scheduling stuff and helping each other out. And it was nice.

I'm confident if we can keep working together and holding each other to doing work while we're on work hours, the future will be bright. Just today I muddled through back press releases, scheduled museum and garden visits, made new contacts and did some internal housekeeping stuff for 3CR like minutes and soliciting more entries for my section. I'm updating here and searching out new things everywhere and I'm really happy with how this new schedule began.

I'm outing myself here as a way to say I'm here to work, and we're gonna make this thing happen.
Day 1's the hardest. Now to keep it going.

Here I Am Again

On my own? Going down the only road I've ever known? (I can't not start singing that when I say what I said, so...sorry?)

Anyway. Just me.
Just me at the keys again, wondering why it's always so long before I write for me. This time, I had a big push into the "guilt about not writing something that's not an article" from the American Writer's Museum opening in Chicago just two days ago. It's full of so much about writing, about process, about just doing it even though everything that falls out of your head and onto the page just seems trite or silly or wrong.

I wrote the non-upside down part on the story canvas table at the museum, and thought I wanted to develop that into something, someday. Then I thought, why not sooner than "someday."

It's a hatchling I'm watching over.

I feel like it goes with the thoughts that were running through my head the other day as I was cruising into Chicago. Everything was an electric green and in full bloom, and instead of that amazing "spring  has sprung!" feeling you get sometimes when the sun is just warm enough and the grass is all lush and the sky's impossible blue, I felt a certain sadness. I felt like I was inside but everything else was outside, away from me. Like somehow I missed all the flowers and breezes and rivers rushing with runoff.

It's only May, but it's already May. May's just on the precipice of summer. The AC units are already in the windows and many people wiser than me have already been working on their swimsuit form. I feel like I'm emerging from a cave when I go outside during the daytime and I'm not at a grocery store.

My BFF forever came out from Seattle just a week or two ago, and we were EVERYWHERE. We saw tons of mutual friends, drove all over creation, ate at all the restaurants you have to eat at when you're gone from the Midwest and Chicago, and shopped til we dropped. We watched DS9 all in the same room (my boyfriend, myself and my bff all watch ds9 on Thursdays as a way for me to keep in touch with her. It's awesome).  We went to the Field Museum, which I haven't done as a "civilian" for SUCH a long time, cruised Lake Shore Drive, and generally gawked. We hit Freeport for a weekend of games and movies and the "same old" that for our group of friends never gets old, we went to Portillo's and on a zany journey through Target with Trev and Sami, and we caught up with an original member of our "biotch squad," Cherie.

It was awesome, if exhausting, and I was *so* glad to touch back on those connections.

So why so blue now? I think part of it is the angst that is PMS, part of it is that feeling you get when you get a taste of something awesome (like having your BFF NOT be thousands of miles away all the time) but then it goes away because it's temporary. Probably one last part is that my schedule...our schedule...is totally not a thing right now, and we really wanted it to be. I'd love to "get outside and enjoy the season" which I think is where my spring related ennui on the drive the other day is coming from, but I also want to do things like...get my shit together and get the house in order and get on schedule with writing. The list was short, then it was long, then it was longer.

April was a blur, between trips to MN for Easter and C2E2, and it all just rolled right into May with no sign of stopping. Now I'm just begging for some sort of routine to emerge again. As much as I worry about missing the thousands of things in bloom (achoo, by the way...) I also have a strong desire to cocoon myself in the bedroom with netflix and my blanky for awhile til things feel normal again. Which likely would only exacerbate things, but sounds absolutely like therapy.

I'm disjointed, and so is this, but I'm determined to try and do better.
I want to keep those connections to my friends more frequent, keep this house running more consistently, even in the face of weird schedules, and really go somewhere.
I can't word that into existence, though. I have to work it there.

It's time to work.