Minor Issues

Something about being unemployed sure has mellowed me. I find myself shrugging a lot. Now that things have settled with my brother, I'm just kind of sitting around, waiting for something else to happen. Oh, I'm writing and revising and catching up on my reading, so I'm not a slug. But it just seems kind of, well, blah. Last night I went to my critique group and had to spend quality crit time with one of our more, shall we say, colorful members. Don't get me wrong, color is a great thing in a writing group. But sometimes it's like finding a rainbow in the middle of the most hellish thunderstorm. Since Mark wasn't there and couldn't possibly understand the entire experience (and for that he should be grateful), one of the other members and I hung out afterward to just sit there and say, "Wow." And then I went home, told Mark the abbreviated version and went to bed. Now I'm just kind of sitting around again, waiting for my next social encounter and the life and energy it will bring before I go back into hibernation.

Something tried to stir me this morning. I went to my on-line crit group to find that one of our newest posters had pulled his story, citing he posted it somewhere else where he could get a crit in a reasonable amount of time. This is the same guy that peppered the entirety of his crits with a lot of "I need" phrases that hint at the sort of "I know how to do everything, let me tell you how it's done" attitude that, thankfully, I only bump into rarely with my writing. His crits did have a lot of good points to them, and I will let them percolate as I finish my draft of The Masque, but it was just so prickish. Like how he was trying to school me on lab techniques, then made a little note that he had read my bio and realized that I "was degreed enough to know these things" and moved on to the next piece of criticism. But things are just so blah right now that I debated whether I cared enough to post about it here. I decided to go ahead and blog it, just for the sake of something to do.

This is why a life as a writer is going to be a challenge for me. I need social contact and more than just a few hours a week. And yet I need to write and have more time to do it than I did while I was working. (People keep telling me I need to read that Catch 22 book.) I hope I figure out what to do with myself and my writing before I'm 60. It would be nice to have a good five years of knowing what I want to do with my life and being able to do it before I retire.