Personal Update

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As I promised, things on the .org are going to be moving kind of slow here as I continue with the first stages of novel-editing.  From my experiences editing my poems and short stories, I know that these first edits always take the longest to do, and the novel is proving no exception.  It’s one thing when you’ve only got one or ten or twenty pages to edit, though; when your work is over four hundred pages long, then things become a lot more complicated.  I wouldn’t even dare to venture when I’ll have the novel to a point where I feel comfortable shopping it around, but I’m going to keep at it as much as work and other commitments will allow me.

Unfortunately, life has gotten a lot more hectic for me these past few weeks.  On the fourth of this month we got a call from one of my uncles up at the Shannon vacation home in Michigan, saying that Grandma Shannon had died quite suddenly.  Grandma Shannon was the last of my four grandparents to die, and in the past fourteen years I’ve lost not only all four grandparents, but also my best friend, Dad, an aunt and an uncle, and four cats.  I drifted away from my extended family in high school as I was beginning to discover things about myself — they’re all very religious, and not accepting of certain aspects of me and my life — but losing a relative is never easy  As if I didn’t need the spectre of family deaths hanging over my head any darker than it already was, two days later Mom went to the hospital with a bad case of pneumonia.  She recovered, but pneumonia was what killed her mother back in 2003, and that realization made me very worried and very nauseous.  Mom’s also started on anti-depressants, which means now I’m the only person in my immediate family not taking them.  Irony can be so ironic sometimes.

There have been lots of ruptures in my personal life these past few months as well, stuff I can’t really get into any detail about here.  I have to admit that I’ve been thinking about pulling a J.D. Salinger here and just putting a stop to my social life, if only to give me more time to focus on all my writing projects, but I know I can’t do that.  I’ve never been a social butterfly, but when circumstances have forced me to go without in-person social gatherings for long periods of time, it’s been detrimental to my overall well-being.  I’m trying to force myself to hurdle all these obstacles people throw at me and be more open socially, but ever since I completed the rough draft of the novel back in May, I’ve felt a lot different, like completing that draft unlocked something in me.  There’s certainly nothing wrong in wanting to see the novel through to its end — hopefully a release from a major publisher, but I’m not holding my breath on that — but I have to balance that with other aspects of my life.

In the meantime, things will probably continue to be slow on the blog here, just because I don’t have that much time to write here, and honestly politics is just getting too depressing to write about.  I’ll try to keep in touch as best as I can, though.  We’re less than two months away from the ten-year anniversary of the .org, and I want to do something special for that.

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