Vacation (All I Ever Wanted)

So what do you do with a four-day weekend?

In theory it sounds like a lot of time, two extra days to sleep in, decompress and get stuff done that I've had to let slide because of work, school, John and too much time blogging. But if I sleep in, the morning and part of the afternoon is gone. John is around to distract me and lead me astray with DVDs and shopping and 77 versions of Caravan on mp3. Cooking for Thanksgiving took up a big chunk of yesterday, and what the heck have I done today since I got up at 2 PM?  I've responded to some email on this screen name only (I really need to face up to the other two screen names; it's been many weeks). I've eaten some leftovers. I've scrunched John's shoulders and neck, watched most of Iron Giant, and listened to the first thirty seconds of Caravan as done by a couple dozen artists from Chet Atkins to Tito Puente. I've printed two of the three Economics chapters I'm supposed to read this week, catching each page as it flies out of my $50 Canon printer into midair. I've read a few journals. I just watched Enterprise.

Doesn't sound very productive to me.

What I wanted to do today was start entering changes into my master documents of the first volume of Mages of Mâvarin, from the notes I've been making in my printout for the past couple of months. I figured that in four days off, I could get in one day of serious work on the novel, before jumping back in on my Economics homework. Instead I wrote this week's installment of Joshua Wander, which I will therefore be able to post sooner rather than later tomorrow. I've only done about a page of the Mages edits. Why? Partly it's because JW's story is the one that's got the creative part of my brain all worked up at the moment. That's understandable. It's just started pouring out after thirty years of blockage. Naturally it's engaging more synaptic circuits than a story that's more or less finished for now.

But it's also a matter of time and space. The time component is that I know I should start on my homework tomorrow if I want to get caught up with it and not end up all stressed out and sleepless as usual. That doesn't leave a lot of time to start on something that will take weeks to do properly. The space component is that this desk has two computers on it now, the Compaq and the iMac. When I was working on the second novel, as I did every night for about three years (except for the night after my gall bladder surgery, a night in the ER with my mom, and a night in a different ER with a suicidal friend), I only had one computer, a Mac. That left room on my desk for the notebooks and napkins and anything else on which I'd scribbled scenes and plot notes and notes about characters. Now I have no place but the floor on which to put my Mages binder, and that's too far away for me to read my handwritten notes and edits.

So what do I do? Take the Compaq in the bedroom, where I can spread out on the bed with the notebook? I can't really get comfortable there, and it takes me away from my Internet access, which might not be such a bad thing. Should I haul my notebook and computer over to Barnes & Noble and work there? Seems to me the B&N cafe will be packed on Black Friday. I can't plug in the laptop there, and those little tables don't really have room for both the computer and the binder.

Sigh. Well, I'll think of something. But I strongly suspect this is going to be another wasted weekend.

Karen