~MA for Cash's mom.

Part of living with an infant is admitting that you no longer control your schedule. If the child doesn't sleep, you don't sleep. If the child is sick, you don't get work done. If the child is screaming, you don't get work done. Sometimes simple events, like changing clothes or bathing, take nine times as long as you imagined possible.

Yeesh, remind me not to get one of those. (I know, I know, all worth it. But it sure sounds like a bitch.)

Susan, I have so much admiration for how you've spent a lot of time thinking about and setting out goals, and you really push yourself to advance them even when things get really tough instead of just saying it'll wait til later. But it's hard to hear you beating up on yourself so much - I think maybe in the face of those goals it's perhaps hard for you to see how much you are accomplishing. I hope you can find a place where you can appreciate what you're managing to do and keep pushing for more, without taking the bumps in the road so personally. Seriously, from my perspective, you rock like a rocking thing.

I just officially decided to cut myself some slack on my self-imposed writing deadline, which is to finish the novel by the end of August.

First off, there's a month of slack built in--I've given myself September for a first editing pass, but all I really want is to have the rough draft finished and the first three chapters super-polished by October. And the reason for that is because I know I'll be at a writers conference where I can pitch it to editors and agents then, and you really need a completed ms to do that. But they only ask you to send them a partial.

And I just realized that even if I'm two chapters from the end by conference time, it's still perfectly OK for me to pitch the book, because I know myself well enough to know that once I'm that close I will finish, and before they've had time to read my partial and request the full.

And EVEN IF everything falls apart and I'm nowhere close to being done by October, the Whidbey Island Writers Conference happens every March. I can wait till March. And then there's the big Pacific Northwest conference every July, or if I can afford the travel by then, RWA National around the same time.

IOW, it'll be OK. This doesn't have to be the year I prove I'm capable of writing fast.

beth, your goal musings are entirely in line with what I learned in business school. If you're meeting all your goals, your goals are too low. If you can't meet any of your goals, they're too high. Ideally, they should be just beyond what you would do without trying hard.

Scary stuff, Cashmere. If it makes you feel any better, about ten years ago my dad was scheduled for an angioplasty that turned into a quadruple bypass. He made it through the surgery fine and is healthier today than he was then.

eesh, remind me not to get one of those. (I know, I know, all worth it. But it sure sounds like a bitch.)

Bwahahaha! I gotta go with brenda on this one. No offense meant at all to any mothers. But it sounds all very scary. and exhausting.

Good on you, Susan.

'Ma to your Ma, Cashmere.

Much ~ma to Cashmere's mother.

Parenthood: it's the toughest job you'll ever love.

But it sounds all very scary. and exhausting.

Yup.

lots of ~ma to Cash's mom.

-t - I've been wondering how you've been feeling lately? (holy crap, there's that question that I was just complaiing about last week!!!) Ok, I guess what I meant to say is, how is the pregnancy going so far?