Having Time

The funny thing about this week’s image is that while it’s true, counting the hours we spend on our various activities sometimes also reveals… there really aren’t enough hours in the day. And sometimes decompression by way of reading through the night is the best way to balance the work-day stressors we deal with.

I had one of those super-long days at the office Friday that left me craving a fictional escape. Jami Gold’s Treasured Claim not only provided that, but kept me up all night reading. Quite the endorsement when it comes down to it, since I was already bone tired when I started. But especially given where I am with my editing, it was useful to see how an elegantly conceived pairing of characters with daddy issues could pay off as a satisfying romance. I think it means I’ll be shifting when certain scenes happen in my Dust to Blood story to make the pairing in it more natural and easier to follow. Luckily, this fits in with feedback from my editor, so I’m glad for a fresh example to keep me on the right track.

The downside to having done that was that my already scheduled weekend was beset by my own weariness. I’d thought I might be hyper-productive with edits over the weekend, but… not so much.

My productivity of the week was in finally writing the blurb for book 3 of the Red Slaves trilogy, and introducing my readers to the final versions of the new covers for Blood to Fire and Fire to Dragon.

Things I learned this week: Race riots as a phrase were originally used to describe mass attacks by white Americans on black Americans. Also, in the context of celebrating America’s birthday on July 4th, my blogger friend Alicia Anderson reposted an evergreen article she’d written about Constitutional rights, Civil rights, and Human rights that broke down the differences between those three concepts and illustrated the clear gaps between them in an elegant, easy-to-read way. A few days later, a brief trio of tweets put those power dynamics into the current timeframe, in the context of employment within academia. An article this week in Teen Vogue about the evil, disfigured antagonist trope put all of these dysfunctional relationships in another sphere by pointing out how ableism is but one more in the multitude of forces that push us toward that mythical average human perspective. It’s the poison that makes everything outside of an unattainable statistical norm an attribute worth detesting or otherwise viable for becoming the scapegoat that with its death will carry those shadows away.

It all makes me sad. Why can’t humans enjoy and celebrate not only their own uniqueness, but also that of every other human? It seems to me we’re individuals for the profound spiritual lessons that can come from communities, partnerships, and sharing. But history is rife with examples of wars over differences rather than celebrations of differences, so I suppose there will be more pain and death and suffering as we continue to learn these difficult lessons.

I’m reading Radical Candor for work, and wonder if it might have useful insights along these lines, too.

As for my other goals, my phone says I managed an average daily step count of 5,896. We’re walking significantly more, again. And Tashie is driving it. The past two evenings she was the one who crossed the road to make sure we made the turn-off to the W&OD trail near our house. In fact, last night, going that way provided us with an inexplicable light-show over the course of the final 20 minutes of our walk that perplexed even our retired Air Force officer neighbor.

Which brings me full-circle to the point of my writing: There are so many levels of mysteries out there for us to witness and explore, it’s worth the shift in perspective that a good story brings to our ability to have an open mind when faced with the baffling.

So I’ll keep plugging along, and let you know how it goes next week. Meantime, as always, the ROW80 crew is working, too.