Wednesday, February 22, 2012

So Much To Do, So Little Time

I'm on a tear!  Having shelved (temporarily to indefinitely) the 147 page, non-fiction manuscript I wrote last spring and be-labored over all summer then ignored all Fall and suffered over the proposal this winter... I am deciding to scrap it.  Well, maybe not scrap it, but re-work it in the future because it is not fleshing out at present.



So, I'm onto something new.  You know, one of those things that jolts you like sitting on a tack.  Where you say "Oh, man, that might really be a good idea!" and you can't get your mind off of it?  THIS new book is taking shape so much more quickly than the first one and I think the main reason is that it is more marketable to a much wider audience.  I feel sad about the first book which was nearer and dearer to my heart as a writer, but I recognize why it took me so long to wrangle it into "being" and why I just couldn't "pitch" it in a 50 page proposal... I couldn't get it "right."  I just never felt like it became a cohesive unit with a POINT.  Books need points ya know.  And this new one... on an entirely different topic that has NOTHING to do with special needs or motherhood... this one is just falling into place.  Weird.  We'll see.

So, the problem is that there are not enough hours in the day for ANYthing, let alone anything remotely productive.  This new book proposal is taking up volumes of my non-existent free time and because my silly-butt registered for the Broad Street 10-miler I officially had to start training as of this week.  Four days of running each week from now until May.  Why did I do this to myself?

Since I took almost a month off of regular running, I lost all the speed and distance I had worked up to.  I'm basically starting at square one again.  So, now I'm freaking out because I'm writing the book late into the night and have to get up in the wee hours of the morning to run and I'm sleep deprived and my flippin' lower back has been bothering me since September... and I mean every single day, non-stop, like an iron rod is inserted into my last 6 vertebrae and it just aches and hurts and running is seriously not that fun with a decrepit back.

So I googled "lower back pain" and added "abdominal pain" because it does sort of radiate into my abdomen and I feel full and bloated like I'm PMSing all the time when I'm not.  So, according to Mr. Google and his band of experts I either have arthritis or cancer.




DISCLAIMER:  Please disregard the gun in the picture which totally puts me off, but the quote itself was too funny.  And please don't think I'm making a joke about having cancer.  I fully understand how serious it is and have lost family members and seen friends lose people they love so please lighten up if your panties are in a bunch.

Google breeds hypochondriasis.  Now I'm even more freaked out because how can I write this hot non-fiction book proposal and train for a 10 mile race with cancer?  I can't.

There seriously aren't enough hours in the day.

4 comments:

kario said...

Woohoo! It is so great to have an exciting project to do, though, isn't it?

I had to laugh out loud at the cartoon. I am guilty of looking up my ailments on the Internet (WebMD is my preferred site) and then wondering whether I'm afflicted with some horrible disease before dismissing it outright as gas. My grandmother thought gas was responsible for every pain you could have - and she might have been right, given that she was Ukrainian and survived mostly on cabbage and beets.

Good luck with the writing and the running. Can't wait to see how both turn out.

barbarab said...

Order the book How to Treat your Own Back. Out of print but you can get on Amazon. See you on Broad Street!

Elizabeth said...

I hate to hear that you completely shelved the book, but I'm excited that you're excited about the new one. And I totally understand your "cancer" scare with Google. I once was convinced that Sophie had an African tapeworm (that she got from a flea-bite from our then new dog) that had caused her to lose so much weight and made its way to her brain where it resided, making her seize. I was so convinced of this that I even convinced her pediatrician to do a stool test.

Alicia D said...

LOL- Elizabeth, African tapeworm??? REeeeeally?!?!? Im cracking up (but only bc she doesn't have it!) :)

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