The Idea of Free Time Terrifies Me

Some things feel like they take forever to accomplish, but then when they are so near, taking that last step makes you sweat between your shoulder blades and your stomach grab for your throat. Because it can't really be happening.

Graduating college is one of those things. Planning a wedding is another. Moving, yet another thing that takes two lifetimes in the span of a few weeks to accomplish, and yet the average person does each of these things several times before they die. In the writerly circle, finishing a manuscript, landing an agent and then selling a book each seem to take a life time to accomplish.

Humans perplex me, but alas, the tech to alter one's species has not been invented just yet so I'll deal.

So we--I--spend the best years of our new adult lives in an institution to better our minds. Well, maybe not better, but hone, shape, expand them. You name it, there's a college that wants to do it to your brain. My college has decided they've done all they can to my brain, and that now it is time for me to move on. After 7 years of attending college full-time--save for a year off for each of my two children--I will have my BA in English/Creative Writing on June 16, 2013.

And we--my sister and my best friend who oddly enough have the same name--get married in Ohio--one is from Ohio, the other is from Michigan--in the same week of June. The coincidences here are just too unbelievable if anyone wrote them into a book our beta readers would slap us. I mean, c'mon, what are the odds of this happening? Like zilch.

And we move--because old people die and their spouses cannot bare even the thought of living in a house they've occupied with the same person for 61 years, without that person. I've been in the new house for four weeks. Grandma's ghost is rattling around all the 1970s wood paneling calling me The Witch of Endor because of my black hair and wondering when I'm going to make time to finish my book.

But most of all, we write. And we query. And we land an agent who sells our books. Or at least my good friend, Misty D. Waters (author name MD Waters) does, did and did. She landed an agent in October 2012. Within a month her agent sold her first two books--ARCHETYPE and PROTOTYPE-- to Dutton (an imprint of Penguin). Every week I get exciting incites and news from the world/process of publishing. And, let's face it, sometimes the idea of being published seems like finding an alien body in Area 51. Seeing someone you know accomplish this is encouraging and motivating and more verbs than I can fit in this post.

I celebrate my fifth wedding anniversary June 14, graduate college June 16, celebrate my daughter's third birthday June 24, attend my sister's wedding in Ohio June 25, attend my best friend's wedding in Ohio June 29 and celebrate my son's sixth birthday July 3...come July 4th I will need a vacation.

So I'm getting a work schedule.

Because free time, for as much as I want it, it really does terrify me. It's going from having a million and forty-seven things to nothing to do. Like running at warp speed one minuted only to have your legs fall off between strides. 

Happy Reading. Happier Writing.

J