Bo-Bo Knows That Way Lies Madness

Bo-Bo hasn't really been curling up at my feet this weekend. I blame a mean case of the writing blues. The particularly nefarious, unwarranted strain.

On Friday, I shared my madcap triumph from last week. I also shared the fact that I had set August 28 as my personal deadline for finishing the rough draft of my novel. Unless I have another week like last one, I'm not going to make it. And I don't have the kind of schedule this week that will allow for another week like last one.

The completest in me is bummed about this. At the end of May, I bought a pair of cowboys boots while Mike and I were visiting Nashville. They cost more than my wedding dress (which actually isn't as bad as it sounds because I'd be damned if I'd pay that much for a dress I got to wear for about two minutes). The point is, the money I shelled out for the boots was the most money I'd ever spent on a single article of clothing, so I made a deal with myself: the boots stayed packed away until I finished my rough draft.

So I was picturing strolling into class on August 28 with these handsome babies complementing my favorite bohemian skirt. And being that I spend a good part of my day cooking up fictions, in my mind this grand entrance involved climbing onto the classroom table and doing a little victory boogie. Or maybe a Texas two-step, in honor of the boots.

Clearly, missing my deadline is for the best, because really, how would I even manage climbing onto a table in a skirt without flashing half the class and the students in the Emerson dorms next door? At this point I'll confirm that your suspicions about my fictional life being way more exciting than my day-to-day, real life are 100 percent accurate. Well, maybe 90 percent accurate. I once convinced a wee Scotsman to twirl around a bar with me, traveled to Vegas to research the skin trade, and braved my sister's wrath when I not only taught my 4-year-old nephew, Ryan, the word scrotum, but traumatized him with the intel that he had one, too (this after he pointed to Bo-Bo's recently-neutered floppiness and informed me that Bo had a poopy).

But back to the blues. Because of recent mania-level outputs this weekend's page total has fallen a little short: I only wrote 10 new novel pages.

Only? ONLY?!! There was a time when my weekly writing goal was 10 pages a week (2 pages every weekday). Measuring my progress against my 62-pages-in-six-days mania is like a marathon runner deciding that the only worthwhile training schedule is 26.2 miles a day. That way lies madness, indeed.

Especially when you look at the rest of my writing weekend. I wrote not one but two blog entries. And perhaps the most wonderful writing weirdness in a long time: a short story poured out long hand. I'd almost forgotten what it felt like to sit down, write for a while, and stand up with a first draft down.

So my failure to repeat my (ridiculously Olympian) goals this weekend is nothing of the kind, just as missing my (completely arbitrary) August 28 goal isn't really a failure. For a little while, I'll be switching back to a more manageable two-to three hours a day schedule (I'm not a full-time writer, after all) and see where that takes me. The way I figure it, getting to class on Thursday knowing that I have as few chapters to write as Bo has paws on his body is cause to go ahead and dance on that table...even if I have to do so without the boots.