Last month was the first calendar month since I started blogging that I didn’t post a single entry.  I apologize for that, but as much as my life has slowed down in some areas, it’s approaching mach speed in others.  My personal life is going through a huge transition right now, I’m trying to formulate Plan B — the backup in case The Plan doesn’t work (and at this point it looks like one of them has to work if I’m to retain any sense of sanity) — and, perhaps most importantly, my other writing projects are consuming more and more of my time.  If that weren’t the case I think I’d have plenty of free time right now, but as it is the only time during the day I really get a chance to relax is if my mind or my eyes or my fingers just can’t take any more and I have to go lay down for a bit.

For all that today is Singles Awareness Day, I think I have a closer relationship with my first novel right now than I’ve ever had with any human being.  It was a little less than a year ago that I began working on the first draft, and after a cooling-off period over the summer I’ve been chipping away at it, trying to get it letter-perfect.  This is something I’m used to with the short stories I’ve been sending out to various journals, but with a twenty-page story there comes a point where you can look at the whole thing and say, “I don’t think there’s anything I can do to make this story any better,” at which point I send it off in the hope of getting published somewhere.

Even though I know others have gotten to that point with their novels, it’s hard to imagine me getting there myself.  It’s one thing to get ten to twenty pages perfect, and when I say perfect I mean perfect because this is the big leagues, and one flat adjective or verb can be all it takes to get editors to reach for a rejection slip.  Maintaining that over four hundred pages is quite another matter entirely, and it doesn’t help that whenever I’ve gotten a rejection slip I’ve gone back to the story that I thought was perfect and said, “Oh yeah, here are half a dozen things I need to be doing.”  This is part of the writing process — even if I get a story published, by the time the journal’s in my hands I know I’ll find half a dozen other things I’ll wish I could do to it –but it’s much harder to accept in my heart than it is to rationalize like I am in these words.

What this means, at least for the short-term, is that I probably won’t be doing much more blogging.  I’ve stopped watching television and playing video games, and I’m not paying nearly as much attention to the news as I used to.  In a couple of months I should know whether The Plan or Plan B will come to fruition, either of which will involve changes in my life the scope of which I’ve never experienced before.  In the meantime, I have to cut this blog short and get back to editing that novel.  The sooner I get that done, the sooner even bigger changes will come my way, I hope.