ROW80 Check-in: Busy Week

It’s been one of those weeks: Where you’re crazy-productive, and feel like you’re still at the bottom of the mountain of work you need to climb.

And my mom left Saturday night for her latest tour of duty in Iraq. I’m already quite far from my family (mostly, they live in Virginia, 800 miles away). I’m generally happy about having that space as a buffer to give me that sense of independence and distance that allows for some perspective on the emotional ties that bind us to our parents. This week, though, I knew how my mom was struggling to attend to all the final details of dealing with all her stuff, getting the administrative pieces taken care of as she starts her newest job for the US Dept. of State, and still come to terms with the emotional fall-out from her recent divorce.

I’m in a trippy head-space about all those things, and having an iPhone app that allows me to see how her flight was first delayed, and then departed, is making me feel sad and nostalgic and a little abandoned and worried–even though I’m happily at home with my husband and know that the embassy in Baghdad is actually a pretty safe space for her to be, notwithstanding current reporting trends about Iraq.

So it’s a bit of a surprise that I actually managed to finish my first-pass editing on Dementional this week. And then discovered my editor won’t be ready for my manuscript until the 30th. So I get to do a second edit. While I’m re-reading what I wrote last November, I’m shaking my head thinking “this has an uber-geek audience of about five people”… But then I describe it to friends and colleagues, and it seems everyone is interested in my take on how losing a Higgs boson might push a person through alternate dimensions, so I keep soldiering on. It’s a much more philosophical book than the one I published in April, with potentially the same first-person head-space pitfalls, so I keep slashing words, hoping to make the main character’s quest to find himself and his love exciting enough to keep my readers engaged.

At least I’m enjoying it. 😀

I also spent a lot of time writing words for the blog tours my two books will be participating in next month. It’s definitely easy to underestimate the amount of time it takes to respond to author interview questions or develop guest posts that have the possibility of intriguing new readers, so I neglected my own blog Friday night–even though I have a few reviews due and ready to queue up. So I met my generic word goal once again–though readers of my blog wouldn’t know it by what showed up here or elsewhere this week. Nor would my trusty #wordmongering crew, since I didn’t do any sprints with them this week, either. I think I’ve finished all my guest posts now, so this week should be able to return to a better balance between adding new words to Blood to Fire, blogging, and editing stories currently in production. I hope. We’ll see with next week’s check-in.

😉