The writings of April

[starfishstar]

Being on break from work last week was good for writing!

I finished a complete first draft of the huge Snow-Queen-fairy-tale-Harry-Potter-characters fusion I've been working on since December (actually I reached the final word of the draft on the last day before I went on break, but the final section of it felt like a bloated, confused mess; so over break I did just enough editing and wrangling with it to make it feel like an actual, complete thing that can be set aside to settle for a bit, then returned to for proper editing/revision).

I also suddenly out of nowhere completed a 13k fic (also Harry Potter – nominally a little follow-up to my Be the Light in My Lantern series, but my hope is that it could also stand on its own if someone wanted to read it on its own) that I've had on the back burner for ages and kept adding bits to now and then, but was having trouble pushing through to the end. Now it has an end!

And in a sudden burst I wrote a small Sherlock fic I'd had the idea for ages ago, but wasn't sure I was ever going to manage to write. Now it's written!

So now instead of having four endlessly in-process fics sitting on my desktop, I suddenly have three complete drafts eager to be revised and posted. What! 

I'd also set myself a word count goal for the month of April: 20,000 words. That's not huge but also not insignificant, while still being realistic to aim for in a month where I was moving, going away for a few days, applying for a big-deal job that took all my attention for a few days, etc. I came back on Sunday from a few days out of town and did my latest tallying up to find 17,000 of those words written, and a week still left to the month. Yay!

.
 .
  .

    . . . I also came back from my days away to find that the friend I was going to move in with in June, who invited me to split the rent with her on a beautiful house in my favorite part of town where I was finally going to have stability and calm and a place to breathe after two an a half years of bouncing between house-sitting and sublets and always scrambling to find the next short-term solution despite my small budget and uncertain long-term plans, and I was looking forward so so so much to finally having a home after all of that, I can't even tell you...that friend is breaking the lease and backing out on me. Which is not yay.

And so I return to this perpetual peripatetic instability I'm so tired of.

I'm so tired.

.
.
.

The upside, at least, is that I'm free to travel as much as I want this summer, since I won't be paying rent. Ísland, ég kem! (Deutschland, zu dir natürlich auch.)

Comments

[indybaggins]

Wow, congrats on all the writing! You've been so productive!

The house, noooo :/ That's so horrible, I'm sorry, it sounded so lovely.

But yay travel? That's a yay, right? *sends a hug*

[starfishstar]

Yeah, it's really thrown me for a loop – thanks for the commiseration! I was looking forward to this so much, and was making all my plans around it. Not having to pay rent over the summer does mean more freedom, but this was the one time I'd truly decided to sacrifice freedom for stability, because I need the stability!

But yes, travel is the one true upside. I need a little time to stop reeling from having everything pulled out from under me, but then I'll start thinking about travel plans...

[indybaggins]

Yeah, I can imagine, that's not really the sort of thing you just shrug and go 'ah well then'. I'm sorry you didn't get the stability you hoped for. And I hope it ends up feeling like a good thing for you, or at least a not-too-horrible one <3

[starfishstar]

It'll be okay eventually... I think I'm already moving out of utter despair (and also feeling betrayed by someone who had promised something to me) and into okay, well, how can I make this a good thing (like travel!) It's definitely been a roller coaster week, though...!

[rabbitica]

That suuuuuucks. But maybe now you can find something stable that starts in the fall so you're not paying rent over the summer?

You know I know the longing for stability...eventually freedom just doesn't feel like it's worth the tradeoff anymore. Living anywhere for >12 months has really been a revelation!

[starfishstar]

See, the irony (is this an appropriate use of "irony"?) here is that when I say "stable" and "long-term"...it was still probably only going to be for 7 months or so. Because I still HOPE to pull off the plan of getting my butt to grad school for a January start. (Though that would have been a lot easier to do with a stable base of operations to be applying/planning/etc. from.) But still those 7 months would have been 1) the longest I lived in the same place in years and 2) a chance to catch my breath and have a home before launching back out into the madness of grad-school-or-whatever's-next.

Instead now I'm back to the same old insanity like last year, of winter housesit -> cobble something together during the last part of the spring because it's only like two months so it's not worth trying to rent somewhere -> away during the summer because not earning money = don't want to pay rent -> find sublet for just the fall because I'm leaving after that. Exhausting.

That was why I was willing to sacrifice freedom (travel as much as I want over the summer!) for stability (live just ONE PLACE for the entire time from now until January).

You are smart to own a house. I want to own a house. The place where I live, which I will not name specifically in this particular spot because internet and so on, makes that prohibitive. But I think about it all the time!