Reminisce

I've been stressed lately.

What, couldn't tell? I guess I do a good job of hiding it between bouts of rocking back and forth and mumbling incoherent phrases at the wall.

(I've named the wall now, actually. Larry Siegfried. Sometimes he responds to my muttering. Usually with this strange twisted whine that sounds an awful lot like the whine my dog makes when she doesn't get enough attention...oh. Oops.)

Anyway, today I did something I haven't done in a long, long many moons.

I wrote stuff.

And not just the oh-I-had-an-hour-free-so-I'll-hastily-scribble-in-some-edits writing. This was honest-to-goodness writing. An entire day of 150+ pages of unhindered writing insanity. Which subsequently resulted in the completion of "The Massively Insane STREAM PIRATE Revisions of 2010 (working title)".

Yes, I COMPLETED something. This year has been nothing but beginnings for me -- I began a few novels (and reworked the beginnings of a few novels...my character Max can personally attest to this, as he/she has been stuck in he/she land, seeing as I can't quite decide to make him/her a boy or a girl now...) and didn't really intend to finish anything. Finishing stuff was on the backburner, right next to "figure out what to do with life." I had more pressing matters to deal with. You know, like buying a new laptop. And finishing school. And attempting to learn karate.

All in all, I would've been happy if I came out of this year with little to no esophagus damage. (Because stress causes heartburn...sorry, not sure my witty analogies are carrying tonight. Going to explain them all.) So when I started "The Massively Insane STREAM PIRATE Revisions of 2010 (working title)", I tacked on the (working title) because I expected to change it to "The Massively Insane STREAM PIRATE Revisions of 2010-2011". I expected it to take a backburner to the backburner, and be the project I got to when I absolutely had nothing else to do. And most days I was content to not even open the Word doc. Pirates? What pirates?

But spending today completely immersed in my pirate fantasy world made me happy. The kind of unnameable happy that just sits there, grinning like an idiot for no reason. Because even though my life is a giant whirling vortex of WHAT DO I DO NOW OMG, my pirates are still there. And they still rock, even harder now that they survived the Massively Insane Revision.

So as the holidays continue to get crazier and 2010 winds to an end, make sure you create time to get lost in your stories. It grounds you in a way nothing else can.