Before I get started with the endless list of excuses as to why it took me forever to finish this book, I feel the need to relate that I scared the shit out of myself this evening by trying to log in to WordPress and receiving a message that my account had been deactivated.
Now, I have decided to drop my hated middle name “Paige” and just go with J. Dunn, which of course wasn’t available, so had to go with authorjdunn. Annoying that it has to be all one word but I’m sure it’s just me being picky and OCD. Anyway, as I was going through emails from 2012 (no inbox zero here!), I realized that I also changed the account email address, which was the real problem. So I was freaking out a little bit, but only because I can’t stand to lose anything I’ve ever written. You just have to see all my writing folders with titles like “Traveler cuts” and “Warrior extras” and “Druid quotes” to know that.
So.
After not writing for MONTHS, I finally started feeling the mojo again. I wrote for 2-3 hours every evening, last Friday through Monday, and then finished last night.
Yeah. Finishing three chapters was literally all I had to do. Sorry.
And gosh, all it took was two vacations, carpal tunnel surgery, and quitting my job. Oh, and then I saw this on Facebook:
It hit me like a five-ton hammer that it was me and this book.
I hate to blame everything on the ADHD and/or the pandemic, but they did have a lot to do with my stalling out. My husband and I are both nurses and while he works in a hospital and I don’t, we both began working a lot more hours. He bumped up to 60 hours a week from August 2020 until June 2021 with a break for December (he LOVES those winter holidays). I was working 24 hours on weekends as a private duty nurse, which gave me time to write and play with my horses as well as do important household stuff like cooking and cleaning. However, in August 2020, I bumped up to 40 hours a week and from then on we were in survival mode. We had clean dishes and clean laundry, and everything else went to shit in a handbasket.
On top of that, we found out we had termites in August 2020 and had to deal with getting one living room wall, part of a dining room wall, and part of a man cave wall gutted and repaired. Contractors are super busy and said they couldn’t get to it for 3-6 months, so I hired a handyman I trusted and he handled it. Because our house was a fixer-upper when we bought it 10+ years ago, we decided to make lemonade out of lemons and put in new flooring. Of course, it only escalated from there until we also repainted, put in a new fireplace, closed the passthrough between the kitchen and dining room, and took down the living room popcorn ceiling. I knew the DIY popcorn ceiling thing was a terrible idea but my husband really wanted to. I’m always the naysayer who pisses on everybody’s fun ideas, so after saying “This will be a lot of work and probably is a bad idea,” I decided to be a nice and supportive wife by letting Edward do what he wanted. As usual, I was right. It was a god-awful mess and we’ll probably have to have a professional fix the corners if we ever want to sell the house, but it looks okay. I never look at the ceiling anyway.
While we were renovating the living and dining rooms, all the crap that was in there was relocated to our bedroom and the exercise area in the basement. During the big snowstorm, I couldn’t even get out of the driveway, so I repainted the walls and trim in the computer, TV, and library areas of the basement. Then the whole thing was a huge mess, so I spent most of my days off decluttering and cleaning. It’s still not finished, but it’s livable. In fact, the living and dining rooms aren’t 100% finished, but nobody will ever notice that I need to repaint the dining room window trim. Especially not with all the cool nerdy fantasy and D&D stuff in there. 😉 (Book-related side note: I don’t usually let ADHD stop me from doing things, but it’s a fact that there are a lot of not-quite-finished projects around here.)
To go back even further, after obtaining my master’s degree as a family nurse practitioner – and passing the certification exam – I decided that this was not the career for me. I had six months of churning stomach and the worst anxiety of my life after graduation while studying for that exam. Then after I passed, I couldn’t even think about looking for a job without wanting to throw up.
I’ve always believed in following my gut, but it was SO hard giving up on that prospective career. I had spent tens of thousands of dollars on tuition and books, thousands of hours of studying and clinicals, and an untold amount of stress and effort, only to give up on a career before I ever even started it. I felt like an abysmal failure and my confidence in myself was shattered. It has taken every bit of the last three years to heal from that, to get over feeling like a failure in the eyes of society, and finally embrace that I did what I needed to do. Or rather, didn’t do what wasn’t good for me.
That is how I got into private duty nursing. I needed a low-key, very low-stress job where I could recover my confidence and still feel like I was contributing financially to our family. If nothing else, I needed to be able to pay for my own horses, gas, Starbucks addiction, and student loans. For two and a half years, that job was perfect, and I knew I was truly close to being back to normal around June of 2021 and started looking for a work-from-home job. The recruiter, who had sounded so excited to have me because of my ER triage experience, never called back. I took leave to have carpal tunnel surgery, which was on July 23rd (10/10 would recommend). While I was recovering, my husband, who is truly the most wonderful person in the world, suggested that I just quit and stay home. Meanwhile, I’ve been thinking of going back to get my teaching certificate in Fall 2022 so I can eventually teach nursing school. We’ll see.
As I was looking forward to at least a year of spending every morning playing with the ponies, cleaning and decluttering every afternoon, and writing in the evenings, our idiot state legislature voted anti-mask legislation into law. This meant that state could not require the students to wear masks and the decision was left up to local school boards. They did this about a month before school started.
I have an 8 year old granddaughter – let’s call her Pikachu – who is too young to get vaccinated – AND – her mother was accepted into nursing school. Because I want to support my daughter advancing her education and financial independence, I offered to homeschool the kid so my daughter could attend school without worrying about her kid dying from Covid-19. However, Pikachu did virtual schooling last year and desperately wanted to go back to school to be with other kids this year. Yeah, I don’t get it, either. She’s not like anyone else in the family: she’s tall, she tans, she talks a lot, and she loves people. I’m pretty sure she was switched out by the fae at some point, but we’re kind of attached to her now, so I guess we’ll keep her. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Anyway, her bestie’s mom has some health issues and is even more paranoid about getting Covid than we are, so I offered to homeschool her, too. We’ll call her Evee. We got a late start because I had planned a trip to see my sister in L.A., so I just finished the second week of homeschooling two kids with ADHD. It’s actually going better than I thought it would. I can’t set our still-a-disaster house to rights the way I wanted, but I still get my barn time for a couple of hours every morning. Edward calls it my horse therapy, and… yeah, he’s totally right. We homeschool from 11 to 3, and then the Pokémon play while I cook dinner. I watch YouTube with the hubs while we eat and when he goes to work, I go feed the horses supper.
Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights are dedicated to writing from 7:30 – 10:30. I come back from the barn, clean up, put on my pajamas, make tea, light a candle, and tell everybody else to leave me alone. Some of that time will be given to rewriting and editing, but you get the idea. And the nice thing is, I actually feel like writing. I’ve always realized that I can’t wait to be “in the mood” to write, that sometimes you just have to saddle that wild horse and sit on it until it behaves. But in all honesty, when I want to write, the passion really comes through and the characters come alive.
While I’m finished with the first draft, I’m pretty sure it’s really rough. It took so long to write, and the writing was done in big spurts with months between them, that I’m not even sure the plot makes sense. For one thing, Angie’s character is pretty flat and I really wanted her view of the world to be more descriptive. Oh, I wrote it from both Angie and Davis’ perspectives, alternating about every two chapters. I really hope it isn’t super confusing, but we’ll see. Rewriting Angie’s parts will be essential to eliminating any possible confusion because she and Davis have very difference voices. As author Shannon Hale once said, “I’m writing a first draft and reminding myself that I’m simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.”
Let’s hope I’ve been shoveling sand and not shit. 😉
the scriptorium of author J. Dunn 