Frustration

I finally just wrapped up a draft of my next GEMINI issue this weekend...that would be the fall issue, which I have historically (OK, twice) put out in September, but this year was aiming for a more realistic October. Now it's December, still technically fall on the calendar, but Christmas season according to the marketers and the weather (we got our first inch of snow yesterday a.m.).

Much of the delay has to do with the fact that we have one computer, and C is on it pretty much constantly for work when he is home. Then that one computer, a laptop, lost its screen a few weeks ago, and C went through the lengthy ordeal of trying to get it to work with an external monitor, buying a new desktop computer (he's not subject to Buy Nothing Year), moving over all of the files and trying to get the new computer to work properly (what's up with Vista anyway?), and trying to catch up on all that work that he fell behind. Add that to that three-week plague and the all-night butterfly wing marathons, and it has gotten very, very difficult for me to write. Finally I broke down and wrote everything in a yellow legal pad (that's what Annie Dillard uses, right?), snuck onto the computer ahead of C one night and typed it all up,printed it out and let it marinate awhile. In the process, I realized I was going in two different directions and needed to divide my material over two separate issues, which puts me a step ahead for January's (ahem, February's) issue.

This weekend C took the kids to his mother's for a day-after Thanksgiving visit and I connected the old laptop to the new monitor and laid out this issue (apparently Vista doesn't like my old "borrowed" copy of Pagemaker either). I still need to proof it, scan in cartoons and take it to the printer...but then it will be done. But the process has been so frustrating. Of course I don't begrudge C his use of our one computer for paid work, because that's what we live on, but I just hate the sense that what I do--whether it's writing or sewing or knitting or cooking or taking care of my kids--is second-rate because it is of no monetary value. I hate that I've finally figured out what I want to be doing (actually, I've known it since I was in third grade when I used to pronounce that I was going to "be an author" when I grew up), but that I can only do it by stealing a few minutes in the dark of the early morning or on rare afternoons at home alone or scribbling in a notebook late at night (a practice which I have also neglected of late, with no technological excuse).

But then I tell myself, if I really want to write, then I would just write, right? What do you think the chances are of Santa dropping a i-Mac (with Pagemaker--or better yet Quark--and Photoshop loaded on) down my chimney this Christmas? Then I would have no excuses.