I think writers who have families and/or jobs have to be able to shift gears pretty quickly if they want to write regularly. But sometimes if there's one shift too many I can't adjust quickly and I get this weird Twilight Zone feeling. Like, the past few days I've been working on a couple of w-f-h sample reading passages for first graders, so my head is totally in that place, but as of this morning I'm trying to turn it off and turn on the upper YA WIP part of my brain. In the middle of all this, family and jobhunting stuff keep popping in. Besides that, I've been maintaining a very low-level inner freakout over a rash of internet blather that's gotten into my head, where other writers are pontificating about the state of YA and the purpose of YA like it's not opinion but fact--FACT, I say!--and carved in stone, and which is threatening to make me feel like a Lose. Er.

And then in the middle of all this my paperbacks of Repossessed got delivered to my front porch today, and I had forgotten they get to have a silver medal printed on them.

I think my life is way ahead of the silver medals. The silver medals don't know that my fifteen minutes was over a little while ago and that this season's fifteen-minuters are about to take the stage. I've got a mortgage payment and Christmas coming up, a WIP that is a big f*cking mess--no, wait, two WIPs that are a big f*cking mess--and I have been a wreck for two days because it's very important that I nail 200 words of first-grade nonfiction, and I'm not sure how to do that.

Maybe I should have spent more time basking in the glow of silver medaldom. Maybe I should have milked my moment in the sun and done my share of pontificating and tried to store up some writerly ego for later. Oh well--too late now.

Anyhoo, I did dig into the WIP today--between all the other sh*t that keeps heading my way--and I am about to dig in again, and so far I'm feeling pretty darn good about it. For no discernible reason I started trying to flesh out some of the girls, and I like where it's taking me. It's not taking me farther, but it is taking me deeper. And now I see some places where I was skimming along, and I see that I need to go back and put myself in scene in a concrete way instead of coasting on generalities.

But enough of this. Back to the WIP.