What I gave myself for my birthday

Last weekend I turned a year older. Russ could not make it home, so I spent much of the day doing just what I would have been doing if it hadn't been my birthday. No presents or anything like that, so I decided to give myself an odd little gift: Less stress.

For the last several months, I've been half-panicked and stressed about everything. This isn't a surprise since I have never done well with big, unexpected changes in my life. Russ going to New York for work is the worst of that type of change that I've faced since my father walked out on his family and two years later, when I found myself supporting my mother and sister at the age of 15.

I like comfort, calm and quiet. I haven't had that for a while, but I came to realize that much of it was based on my own state of mind. So I decided it was time to settle down and just accept that things are as they are and make the best of it.

Since that day I've written more and done more art than I usually do in a week since Russ took the job.

Can I keep it up? I don't know. I am skirting around things I really do need to get done. I have things I've been planning for Forward Motion that I wanted up long before now, but I'm still toying with them. I will get it done, but it may not be until April or later. I am not going to rush ahead and feel like I need to put my writing and art aside in order to get everything else done.

The writing is going well. I am doing some major work on Silky, though it may not be really apparent since the story is the same. I think it will read a lot better, though! I have started the third book as well, and I'm using it as a sort of morning exercise -- I write about 500 words on it before I go do anything else. It will move slowly this way, but I'll likely start writing more after I get a few other things cleared up. Or maybe not. It's kind of fun to pull it open first thing and just move the story forward a little.

There is a second book between the two, and I'll be rewriting it after I get Silky done.

It's fun to fall into stories like this again.

So maybe now that I feel like I'm really back into writing for the first time this year, I might actually have something to write about here again! Oh, it's not like I haven't been writing -- I've done over 100k so far -- but it was just adding to my stress level, since I kept feeling like I had to work harder on it, do something more, etc. Now that I'm back to the 'this is fun!' stage, I'm ready to write about it more as well.

Or at least that's how I fell tonight!