What Might Be Keeping Me Up at Night

I confess that my just-adopted practice of writing for a half hour on my dystopian novel before doing anything else has impacted my blogging.  Let me collect a few reflections here, while I wait to stop sweating profusely from my morning walk so that I can take a shower and go to work.

--I feel like there's not enough time in a morning to do all I want to do:  blog, write a poem, work on my novel, eat breakfast, and exercise.  I feel like something is always being sacrificed.  And then there's the reading I want to be doing, the art.  And there's the wishing I had more time with friends.

--I wrote this Facebook post this morning:  "Weeks ago, I pre-ordered Margaret Atwood's follow-up to "The Handmaid's Tale." That book has just been shipped to me. Oh dear. Perhaps I shall pull an all-nighter later this week. It will make me feel youthful again--5th grade youthful, when I stayed up past my bedtime reading a book under the covers with a flashlight."

--Should I re-read The Handmaid's Tale before I read The Testaments?  I just reread The Handmaid's Tale just after Trump was elected--it's not completely unfamiliar.

--I truly am tempted to read it in one big gulp when it arrives.  I have waited impatiently all summer.

--I also worry that it might impact my own writing.  I don't want to feel like there's no point in my own writing.

--As I've been writing more, I've been thinking about my novel as an exploration of the ways that women cope with repressive regimes.  It's also a novel that asks, "What is truth?" 

--Can I pull it off?  Am I pulling it off?  A friend asked if I knew how it was going to end.  Unlike with other novels I wrote, I have no idea.  Well, I have lots of ideas, but I have no idea how it will end.  I'm 60 pages in, and it's taken some interesting twists and turns that I didn't anticipate.  It's a wonderful process.

--If it's ever made into a movie, I want Rhiannon Giddens to be in charge of the music.  I am besotted with her latest CD.

And now, it's time to head to work.