...albeit with early morning cocoa instead of late coffee.

And though the house is quiet, it is nevertheless full of sound -- the clack of the dog's nails against the floor, the hum and rattle of the furnace and its grates, the chirpings of the birds outside...

What you’ll find when you leave the comfort of your 7 and go chasing after that 10 is that your 7 was never a 7. It was only a 3.

- Steve Pavlina

2008 is apparently going to be the year I grapple with this. On the one hand, it is daunting each time I realize anew how much more work I need to do (fundamentals to practice, texts to read, etc.) to get to the points of competency and readiness I'd thought I'd reached. It is also scary when I chart out my obligations vs. my wishlists and realize I'm unlikely to have much to show for some of these projects until 2010 (if ever), given that I'm no longer willing to sacrifice sleep or domestic comfort to eke out a couple more hundred words a night, and it makes me frustrated with myself for having wasted so much time before.

That said, I have gotten significantly better at saying "no" in recent months (and my new spreadsheets have been reinforcing the necessity of that), both to other people and to myself ("Ooh, shiny!" "Is it shiny enough to postpone ____?" "Dammit!"). I have also somehow become more inclined to wring joy and serenity out of every day -- which is not say that I'm not still cranky and whiny and fussy and mopey and envious and anxious too many hours of the day, but there are also more and more moments where I'm able to breathe deep and let myself be overwhelmed with the wonderfulness of being alive, and to rejoice in where I am both physically and professionally without fretting (at least, not too much) over how I should be further along.

This week there was also the pleasure of realizing "I am the person best qualified to bring these characters to life, and they deserve to go forth into the world, and therefore it will not be a waste of time to work on this story, regardless of whether anyone buys it or not when I'm done creating it." (In all honesty, I don't always feel this way about my writing, and I'm coming out of a two-month patch of "why bother with the sound and fury when there's so many other people sounding and furying about and it's all going to end up in recycling bins and you don't sound all that different from all those other people" wrt poetry.) This followed the moment where it dawned on me (1) what my story was really about, as opposed to the short escapist bagatelle I'd originally intended, (2) that it was going to be at least twice as long as I'd originally planned, and (3) that there will now be a boatload of research required -- about stuff I'm curious about anyhow, but dammit, I'd had other plans for my free time this year.

Cue in a storm of swearing... followed by "I can't not write this story." Which is the sign of a plotbunny about to hijack my brain, and as much as I kvetch about that when it happens, it's also one of the things I live for, because it means the characters are strong enough that at some point they're going to surprise me by saying things that will make me and other people laugh (or wince, or gape, or sigh) that I would have never thought of saying in those words without the characters to voice them. And that's the point where writing stops being a pain in the ass and becomes the reason I get up and dance around my living room.