Life
For those of you that may have missed it, I recently started a professional program that is supposed to go for about a year and end with me getting a new certification that will dramatically improve my day-job prospects. It has been and will continue to be to the detriment of my writing, but once the program is over, it should open doors that will allow me and my family much more financial stability and a better work-life balance—which should in turn give me more opportunities to write and get my work out there in that eventual future.
The first semester of the program is wrapping up this week, which means that in the last two weeks I will have had no fewer than seven exams. It’s been a pretty brutal experience, but I am definitely learning a huge amount and, so far, don’t appear to be failing anything. I am very much looking forward to the end of the year, when the intensive coursework will turn over to a five-month internship period. Not only will it make all the concepts I have been studying feel more practical, but it should also result in a reduced amount of homework. I am holding out hope that my writing (and my sanity) will return at that time.
Little baby Malachi is six months old now, and I can’t believe how fast it’s gone. He’s almost sitting up on his own, can roll over in both directions, and is seriously thinking about crawling. It would be fair to guess that he’ll be making my wife and I’s lives a lot more hectic in the next month, as he’ll suddenly be getting into everything that we thought we’d sufficiently baby-proofed.
Griffin is about to start Kindergarten this month, which I think will be really good for him. He’s a smart kid, (I know every parent thinks that about their kids) and is clearly excited about learning. It will be a big adjustment for him, and he’s nervous about the longer days compared to his preschool, but I think once he’s started on it he’ll be missing it every weekend.
Tiber will likewise be starting preschool, which will hopefully take a bit of pressure off of my poor wife. He’s got a ton of creative energy (and a ton of energy in general) and it can be hard to focus it on productive things continuously throughout the day. Unfortunately, being only 3, he doesn’t do a good job of respecting time-and-place yet, so if you don’t give him a healthy way to create his art, you might soon find a wall of a floor has been finger-painted (sometimes with things other than finger-paint).
Writing
I was kind of dreading writing this section this month. It always feels bad to say “not much happened”, especially when my most recent monthly update suggested that things would be happening. Those of you that know me well can imagine this has turned into a few miniature self-destructive spirals over the course of the month, but with everything that’s going on, I’m just trying to move toward accepting it.
It wasn’t that there wasn’t time. That’s the worst part of it. It’s not every day, but at least some days I finish my school work and I have an hour on my hands to do what I want. I could write, but after 10+ hours of working on school stuff on a given day… it’s just really hard to decide to keep working with the one free hour I have. I’ve been telling myself that if I want to avoid burning out, I need to allow my brain time to recover. So I’ve been replaying my favorite game of all time, Hollow Knight.
In spite of that, I did do a couple writing-related things this month. I wrote the prologue for the first book of Neon Arcana (the one I thought I would be drafting during the intensive leg of the program) before deciding that I was going to burn out trying to keep going. I also outlined a handful of new short-form stories (two short stories and one novella), which might be more realistic writing goals during this overloaded season. But we’ll see. I’m not going to allow the impossibility of massive writing progress to destroy my sanity or my will to push through what is already a difficult time in its own right.
As always, thanks for reading. Best wishes for the month of August.
L.A. Morton-Yates