In which I am keeping it sane here, people

Yep, still revising, still wrestling with the challenges of doing something VERY different. And I fear that I've moaned so much about the crazy that I haven't told you about the good. Here's the painful dichotomy of the whole creative endeavor--if you're pushing yourself hard, trying new things, flying without the net, kicking off the training wheels, then it's TERRIFYING. It can give you sleepless nights and cookie binges and too many glasses of red wine and countless moments of knife-edged tension so sharp you cut yourself on them while you're pouring your heart's blood into your work. BUT IT'S WONDERFUL TOO.

And that's the reason we do it. I mean, you'd have to be a masochist of the first water to do this without a payoff and I'm not talking money. There has to be a bone-deep satisfaction that this work is worth doing, and those moments are the ones that keep you from chucking the manuscript into the shredder and picking up an application to work at Kinko's. (They'd never hire me. Those big copiers intimidate me thanks to a collating incident we will not speak of when I used to temp.)

Yeah, it can be awful. But it's sublime, and it's good more often than it's bad, and that's why we do it. Or at least, that's why I do it, and I figure I'm no different from other authors. (Y'all realize that's still weird for  me, right? Lumping myself in with other professional people who write for a living and get royalty checks and have books on shelves in actual stores? Yep, so surreal I can't quite get my head around it and I've been published for five years. It's probably time I claimed that and acknowledge that yes, I am a professional and I even occasionally know what I'm talking about when it comes to writing. You can't see it, but I just broke out into a flop sweat writing that.)

Anyway, I'm trying lots of things right now to keep the moaning bits in check and pump up the sublime. Survival tips, if you will, and here's one: I've replaced all of the serious and important books on my nightstand with nothing but children's lit. Right now it's three Mary Poppins books. Children's lit is colorful and truthful and, I suspect, very difficult to write. But it's also straightforward and simple, even when it's dealing with difficult themes. So, it's carpetbags and cream teas for me at bedtime in an effort to induce a peaceful night's sleep. I'll keep you posted if it works...