Good News!

Dear friends, I have good news to share with you: I have been accepted into a graduate program for creative writing!

The process has been a long one, filled with indecision and self-doubt (and don't think for a minute that a little thing like acceptance can banish the demons of doubt!), but now that it's really happening I am really, really excited and not a little freaked out.

This will mean, no doubt that my time spent in this space will diminish over the next couple of years, but I won't go away altogether. I can see now that it will be more important than ever to nurture moments of mindfulness and slow-down time with my family, and let's face it, I'm much more apt to do something fun and creative with my kids if I can show it off on my blog.

This is one of the BIG reasons I've been trying to clean and declutter my house and finish all those nagging little projects for the last year; I want to get my household running like a well-oiled machine so that upkeep is a snap when I will need to be spending every spare (and a few not spare) hour writing and reading.

As it turns out, though, I have a lot of work to do before January that I was not expecting. I've spent the last week since I found this out getting ready to write:

• I emptied out all of my desk drawers (into a grocery bag, to be dealt with later) and tidied them, so one has office supplies, another nature journaling materials (I can't give that up), a third holds my laptop and camera, and the fourth has some reference materials. 

• I exchanged a package of blank Moleskine notebooks I had bought for our Colorado trip that never came to pass for ones with lined paper (I've only every used cheap composition books; I think these fancy ones will be a treat). 

• I bought a file box to keep my work organized. I arranged the file folders on my computer and in my memory sticks. 

• I've been reading and rereading The Productive Writer, plus this and this and this advice for finding/making time to amidst the demands and obligations of work and family.

And then...I started to write. Sunday afternoon, in between mega kitchen re-org (more on that next week) and cooking dinner, I plopped in the hammock with my laptop and typed. Kids ran around the yard and climbed in to visit me now and then. M wanted to know if any of my characters were modeled on him. After a couple of hours, I set it aside for the dinner/bath/story/bed rituals and then resumed writing. By 10:30 I had drafted a 15-page story. No doubt it is, in the words of Anne Lamott, a shitty first draft, but I went to bed flying high (and completely unable to sleep). I might actually be able to do this!