Time to Be Human

Here are some things I'd like to put in this space soon:

• A list of all the books I read in 2019 
• My New Year's resolutions and a report on last year's 
• Thoughts on how my last essay of the year is going 
• Pride and concern about how I'm prepping for the Ceremonials launch 

But mainly because of how the last essay of the year is going, I don't know if I can put together all of these posts.

I should have started writing it in November. I should have taken afternoons in the last six weeks to work on it a little bit at a time. Now there are three days left in the year and it's not done. I wanted to finish the essay in 2019 because it's the last essay of the book I've been working on for three years or so, and I want to submit the finished book to a contest that closes on January 31, 2020. I don't really know if I have a manuscript, and I won't know until I finish this essay and put all ten of the essays together. I should have finished the essay in November or mid-December so I could have assembled the manuscript already rather than worrying about getting it done in January.

But I didn't do any of that.

Today I started it, and the problem is the same as it was in November, if not worse: I have so much to say that I don't know how to say it all. I'm likely going to write and then cut a bunch of the draft, which is something I rarely do, but at this distance I'm having trouble distinguishing what's necessary and what interests only me.

I'm also presently reading for two book prizes. One has a deadline in early January, and just this morning I finished enough of the field to feel confident about voting for the choice I wanted to vote for all along. With one exception, the rest of the books in the field are truly wonderful, but my choice is a Mozart book in a field of Salieris. Sorry, everybody else. I really liked your books. The other prize has a deadline in February, and I'm a little less secure about whether I can finish the field in time (bigger field, longer books, I've read fewer of them).

My job has gotten easier both physically and emotionally. My body is recovering better all the time, and I'm starting to be more comfortable with the people and horses at the stable. Getting up stupidly early is working out better than I thought it would. I get up around 5 and spend half an hour settling in to my awake self: eating breakfast, drinking tea, reading Carolyn Hax, maybe doing a tiny bit of correspondence. I need that time to be human, and having it built in to my morning is great, even if it does mean I go to bed around 8:30 PM.

Planning for the Ceremonials launch and tour is going well. I'm done with booking all my travel and lodging and I'm finishing up gathering guests for my readings. I've had postcards made and am spreading them around, I've got plans for window posters for bookstores and little gifts for people who ask questions at readings, and other kinds of promotion are cooking along. I keep buying things for greater convenience while I'm traveling (a special heated brush for my bangs, a warm coat I can compress into a tiny ball) in the hope that I'll somehow be prepared for the tour experience, but underneath I realize this is just throwing capitalism in the direction of anxiety. Some things are worthy - I bought a rolling crate that I can check as baggage to carry my stock of Ceremonials, rather than lugging a cardboard box - but are packing cubes really necessary?

This has been an eventful year, full of highs and lows so numerous I can barely remember them all. I hope I always behaved well in the face of pressure. I can't be sure.

I put stickers on my drafting notebooks to make them mine, and because I know I'll probably fill the notebook before I get sick of the stickers. I've been using this book since 2017. It only has a couple of pages left. With the current essay, I'll finish it up tomorrow or the next day. The Petrified Forest sticker and the Wales sticker are both from 2017, but the Chautauqua and Iceland stickers both came from this year. And I'm visiting the "write" sticker all the time, every year.