How-Things-Are-Going

At lunch with my mother this week I started off with giving her the bulleted update of how-things-are-going. I was talking for a long time, which is when I realized that my life has gotten exponentially more complicated:

1. The writing has been going well. After two months of dithering I finally got things moving and have been writing every day for going on three weeks now. I’m pushing pushing pushing forwards and trying to accept the fact that, while I need this prose be good, it’s going to be re-written, so I also just need to get as much framing up as possible.
2. Roller derby has been going well. There are now forty people in Juneau who refer to me as #574 – Hellion Hanson. My skating has been getting better, I’m constantly pushing myself to try new skills, and I’m hitting harder. I’m also now helping teach a beginning skating class through the Juneau Community Schools program. I’m feeling confident that we’ll be bout ready by the summer.
3. Music has been going well. I’m up to 40 songs in my repertoire and that now includes one song in Cajun French. Andrew, our friend Sergei, and I have been getting together every other week to make dinner, talk about how awesome Cajun music is, and pretend to play a song or two. Recently our pretend playing has been sounding more and more like the real thing. On the honky tonk front, it looks like I’m playing and singing with a three gal band as the Honky-Tonk Angels for a 20 minute set in March. P.S. Singing in Cajun French is hard, especially if you don’t know any French.
4. Trap shooting has been going well. Last week I had my best night of shooting yet and our team is in second place in our heat (last year we were dead last).
5. Editing is going well. I’m now a member of the new editorial team for Flashquake.com, an online and print-on-demand journal dedicated to short-short fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. Reading the submissions is like getting little shots of writing energy, and trying to do a good job of responding to poetry is a new, but really exciting, challenge. We just finished our first submission deadline and our first issue goes live on March 1st.
6. Work is going well.
7. Andrew and I are doing well.

The two month dry spell that I’ve written a lot about recently was also a dry spell for all of these other activities. Nothing was going on. Thinking more about it, maybe that’s part of the problem, for those two months I was freaking out so much about all of the different irons I had in the fire that I stressed myself out of doing most of them.

Weirdly enough, I think that having all of the balls in the air, is the way to keep all the balls in the air. If I lost one or two, suddenly the others would start to sag as well.

I get that this is a lot of me me me talk, but in the next couple of posts, I’m going to go through each of these foci, bust them apart, and try to produce more thoughtful writing about each.