
It’s been an odd week. I lay down at 7:30 p.m. Monday — way before my bedtime — figuring I could treat it as an “afternoon nap” and awake refreshed to work on my blog and stuff. The “nap” lasted until 11 o’clock, but I stayed up as planned anyway and ended up filling a dozen journal pages over the next two hours. Part of those thoughts ended up in my Tuesday blog post, “Taking stock,” which I finished around 2 a.m.
The day job has taken up most of my waking hours since then — one of our three-person staff is taken a well-deserved vacation this week — and I’m still trying to digest the notes to myself from which “Taking stock” emerged.
It was quite a meal to digest. I ran through all of my works in progress, assessing and organizing and trying to wrap my mind around it all, perhaps with an unconscious goal of generating some realistic goals for 2024. I concluded that I have nine distinct works in progress at various levels of completion, comprising the beginnings of two to four series — and those are just the novels.
I also have a couple or three ideas for non-fiction books, a collection of short stories, a collection of poems, and a desire to get serious about writing songs again. Doing the Ebenezer podcast has reminded me that I think it would be fun to start making audiobooks, too. Oh yes, and I still have the above-mentioned day job. Is it any wonder that taking stock is a process that takes a few days?
The attitude shift I described in “Taking stock” is a big step. When I got to the bottom of the 12th page that night, I concluded with this advice to myself:
“You are sitting in a modern-day House of Ideas. Stop moping, take the wheel, and enjoy the ride.”