Snow, Work, Spring

It was snowing this morning, but too warm for it to stick. I’m thinking the hyacinths, daffodils, and crocuses are glad about the last. I’m trying to plant enough favas to outpace the squirrels digging them up, but I suspect it’s a lost cause.

If the squirrels were grateful, it might be different, but they remain tiny tree-swinging assholes.

Afterwar has almost, aaaaaalmost reached the boiling point. When it does, I’ll lunge for the end and call it a zero. And probably try to spend a day in bed to recover, but get up several times to work on the Veil Knights book and Roadtrip Z, because I can’t stop while there’s still a deadline looming. I knew juggling three projects at once would get hairy when one of them reached the gallop-for-the-end stage, but Mama’s got a mortgage to feed, so it’s full speed ahead, damn the torpedoes, and Cerberus take the hindmost.

Except I’m struggling with the old familiar “this book is awful, nobody will like it” blues for Afterwar. And since it’s a book I fought to get a publisher’s decision on, the pressure has intensified. It’s hard to loosen up enough to tell myself “get the whole corpse out, THEN you can revise and make it a beautiful one.” Birth is always messy, and this book is no exception. It’s like Cormorant broke something loose inside me, and now I’m doing much, much more complex works, with correspondingly higher stakes and smaller margin for error. I’m thrilled and scared to death all at once, whenever I sit down to find the next handhold in Afterwar.

Other than that, there are dogs to feed, children to get over the last few speed bumps into adulthood, friends to check in on, sisters to support, and shawls to knit. I’m currently doing a blue version of the Stripey YarnOver Shawl of Doom, for a friend’s wife. Then there will be more Menstrual Fury hats for the Etsy shop, and I’ll finally knit myself a shawl. I should be finished with that just in time for the weather to warm up and it to become unnecessary. *eyeroll*

So that’s my Monday. I have to go run off some of the cake I had for breakfast and work Miss B’s fidgets out. It doesn’t look like any more snow will show up. We ran in hail on Saturday, and Miss B was not very fond of that. Fortunately it was very small hail, and did not sting, but still.

Back to the grindstone.