the math says: I'm tired
I'll be honest, here's how things are: My book is due in two and a half weeks, and my in-laws have been in town for the last six days. My kid turned two five days ago, and had three sets of grandparents here to celebrate (that's children-of-divorce math, iykyk). He had his two-year check-up this morning, and tonight my husband and I are going out to dinner for the first time in, give or take, eighteen months.
I revised six chapters in the last two weeks—that's all the chapters, they're big ones—and added 13,000 words to my draft. I'm waking up before six most mornings, not to work but because I can't sleep later, even with an eye-mask on all night. The baby's waking up around 5:40. He's not really a baby anymore. The cicadas that have been underground for 17 years are emerging, leaving all those holes in their wake. I am thankfully outside of their range, but I've seen the pictures on instagram.
All that math says: I'm tired. There are good things happening—birthdays and a vegetarian baby with nonetheless excellent iron levels, family and dinner out, the baby's new fleet of vehicles that he can play with and vehicles he can ride. 13,000 new words is also extremely good—their existence, not yet their quality. I've also done some new research, about the metaphysics of personhood and dolphin intelligence. I tweeted yesterday something like, Maybe for my next book I'll write about one subject instead of seventeen. I mean, who am I kidding, that's part of what I love about this. Not the writing about even but the learning. But, like I said, I'm tired.
No promises for what this weekly newsletter will be for the next few weeks—it's not that I'm even working on my book in twelve-hour marathons, it's normal sized workdays, still, but the book is sapping me like a beautiful parasite, taking more energy while I'm working and taking my attention even when I'm not. (I can think about it while I'm singing a lullaby, I've learned, but not while I'm holding a conversation with a two-year-old about the various trucks driving past us on the highway.) I'm leaning on my in-laws and husband and being a ten percent worse parent for a little while—for two and a half weeks more.
Tomorrow I flesh out my book's epilogue and then convert the Scrivener file to a word doc, and pay FedEx Office $15 to print it, and then do something like what I've just done a couple more times again.