Keeping It All Together

This past week has been challenging on several fronts. I'm despondent at not being able to go to Nationals, and have been glued to Facebook and the RWA site, trying to live vicariously. I elected not to go because my sister had major heart surgery scheduled this summer. It turned out to be more complicated than anticipated, and was touch and go for a time. She's on the mend now, and should come home next week.

Which leads me to my next challenge. My basement is filled with mold, and has resulted in a sick house. The previous owner decided to finish off half of the basement, and put up drywall and laid carpet without taking the first essential step and waterproofing what was being covered up. I've lived here for seven years now and it's taken this long for the mold to seep through to the point where I could see it. Now, the carpet and drywall will be ripped up and removed before the scrubbing of the mold can take place.

While all this chaos is going on in my life, I'm still trying to write something every day, even if it's only an outline of a story. And, of course, I'm coming up with all kinds of analogies between my life and writing. Such as: Sometimes a story veers off in a totally different direction than you thought it would go when you planned it out in your head and you make adjustments. Sometimes you can't quite put your finger on what's wrong with a story line until it smacks you in the face and you have to remove what's making your story suck.
Sometimes you should stop and write an outline instead of jumping in unprepared and throwing something together.

The mold will be removed next week, just in time for my sister's return from the hospital. All will get back to normal in my world, and I'll be able to sit at my desk and be creative. My second round of edits are due next week, too, which should settle me down and make me focus.  And I'll chat with my friends who did make the trek to San Diego and regale in the stories they'll bring home.

The remainder of the summer will be spent helping Sis out, like she did for me last year, finding an agent for my middle-grade historical, and getting my contemporary, in which I've left my h/h in a precarious situation, finished and polished up.

How about you? What's on your agenda for the rest of the summer?