It's All Relative

Even after all these years, it still amazes me how much what we're accustomed to influences our day to day experiences. For instance, in the autumn when the weather first drops down below 60, we shiver and throw on lots of extra clothes and complain about how close winter is. But this week, after a few months of heavy snow and constant cold, the temperature finally gets into the upper 50s. And how do we react? We peel off our winter coats and run around outside in our T-shirts, overjoyed that it's so incredibly warm.

Likewise, yesterday I was overjoyed to finally finish chapter 12 of my novel. For that matter, I plowed a decent way into chapter 13, as well. Which is great! But given that I'm estimating 30+ chapters for the whole book and I've been working on it since December, I'm not nearly as far along as I'd like to be. It's all relative.

So naturally I'm charging forward this morning to finish chapter 13 and get myself on a more aggressive schedule, right? Well, no. Instead, I'm taking two of my kids to a dentist appointment bright and early, followed by cooking with the kindergarteners. By the time I get home, the day will be half gone. Ugh. Well, not much I can do about that, so I'll just have to try to make the afternoon count. The good news is that I'm happy with how 12 turned out and I'm very excited about 13 and 14, so there's plenty of incentive there to charge ahead. I also need to prep chapter 6 pretty soon so I can take it to the writer's group on Monday.

That ought to be interesting, because there's no chapter that I had more trouble with than 6. To the point that I had to print it out and write topics next to each paragraph to help me figure out which ones belonged in the chapter and which didn't. Then I completely re-ordered most of them, rewrote a bunch and moved a bunch into... actually I don't remember where I put them. I should check and see if they're floating around in stasis somewhere, because they weren't bad, they just weren't right for that chapter. It's all relative, you know?