week #13/52: hideout

week #13/52: tree fort

There is no story for my photo this week. (And by the way, I’m sure anyone following this will have noticed that I’m hopelessly behind in my weeks, with little chance of ever catching up – and I don’t really care.)

Last Friday, I passed 50K on the second draft of my novel-in-progress, and just about as fast as I crossed that line, I promptly disappeared from the internet. Work-related anyway. I took an impromptu weekend off. I wasn’t supposed to be taking the weekend off, since I still need to plump and polish this draft by about another 18,000 words, and there’s this monumental and looming deadline to finish before my kid finishes school for the summer – self-imposed, but since I’m my own employer, I’m being kind of a hard-ass about it, lol! Oh, and we’re also simultaneously planning a trip to England in these same three weeks. 😮

Yet even with all there is left to do, my brain spit out that 50,000th word, and shut down. It felt called for, felt necessary, and so it happened.

We didn’t take any big adventures, though my honey and I managed to go on a date. The rapture didn’t happen. We did some shopping and some cleaning and some laundry. I didn’t take the time off writing my novel just to write my web series instead (like I usually do on my weekends “off”) – I didn’t write anything. I let my Google Reader pile up – 108 blog posts waiting for me to sift through! The publishing industry went on happily without me. I didn’t manage to lose any Twitter followers (though they might not remember who I am next time I post). We watched some movies, and slept, and I played the crap out of my Sims.

I don’t write as fast as some people write, so sometimes I feel like I’m not working as hard. I’m not trying to be precious about my work, saying that my 800 words is harder than anyone else’s – I know it’s not. But the point is, anyway, that hard work isn’t necessarily defined by word output. I should know that – it’s the kind of thing I might tell another writer friend, and yet I hardly apply it to myself. So it creeps up on me, when I’m pushing out my 800 glorious words day after day after day (oh, and well, there’s the mommy/sloppy-housewife job too…), it gets to be a lot. And then, no matter how much I have left to do – or maybe because of it – my mind just needs to run off and hide for a couple days.

I’d like to think of it as a surge protector for my brain. Though it could also just be proof that I’m inherently lazy. 😉