Day: July 13, 2007

Last night I pulled out my planner and wrote a list of all the things I needed to get done today. I’ve done almost all of it. I love days like this when I get it all done. I only worked for about an hour on the schlock book, but the layout guy did contact me. Now I know we’re ready to really start rolling on Monday. Between now and then I need to start scanning in all the art images that we’ll need. That will be hours of work, I’m sure. Also slated for tomorrow are fixing a toilet and fixing the gate to our backyard. So another busy day ahead.

All that I have left on my to do list today is to write 500 words of fiction. I’ve given myself this little assignment so that the fiction doesn’t get lost entirely in the glut of Schlock book and business tasks. Obviously I can write more if the inspiration strikes, but the minimum is to keep me doing it. If you want to get good at something, do it every day.

One of the things I did this afternoon was to take the kids swimming. We were there at the same time as our backyard nieghbors, so all the kids had people to play with. That was fun for them. It was also fun for me because I had someone to talk to instead of being bored.

Having my two nephews here instead of one Kiki changes the dynamic of the family. Mostly it means lots of joyful shrieking as three boys play video games. But another change became apparent when it came time to put the kids to bed. Obviously the two nephews wanted to sleep in Link’s room. They bracket him in age. Patches shares that room, so he obviously was going to sleep in there as well. This left Gleek, the lone girl. Gleek did not want to be left out, so I simply threw some foam pads down on the floor and let them all sleep there.

Getting them all to fall asleep is something of a challenge. They want to romp, I want them to sleep. So both nights so far have involved thumping and complaining and slamming of doors and shrieks and stolen pillows, and dire threats that I WILL separate them if they don’t settle down. Eventually they do fall asleep. When they do, I sneak in and look at them all. They’re all sprawled and variously piled like an adorable litter of puppies. And like puppies, they’re ready to go again the next day.

Last week, before all my creative energy got slurped into the book editing project, I polished up a few blog entries and turned them into essays on my website. I also finished a piece of flash fiction and I’ve posted that as well. If you want, you can go read them: http://sandra.tayler.com/