I'm Baaack...

Well, I'm back from the sort-of sunny shores of Lake Michigan. Sort-of-sunny because after a summer of severe drought baking the entire midwest, Northern Michigan experienced the most rain in months, all while my family and I were trying to enjoy the beach. I figure the state owes me some sort of parade since my being cursed never to enjoy a vacation with perfect weather (we left for our Disney World vacation last summer the day after Hurricane Charlie decimated the Orlando airport) means they got some much needed rain.

Actually, I got back late Sunday, but it's taken me two full days to catch up on e-mails and blog reading. I suppose that says something - that it takes me that long to read a week's worth of blog entries for all the ones I have bookmarked. How many times does PBW recommend taking stock of how you spend your time so you can find more time to write? I think this is telling.

Anyway, as I suspected, I didn't write a single word on my vacation. I took not only the laptop but my brand new Plot and Story Notes Binder complete with rainbow array of Post-It notes which I've determined will be my Bible and way to stay organized. In seven days, two of which were spent almost entirely in the car, you'd think that I'd manage to find a few down minutes in which to write. Not so much.

I did have some quiet moments, but weirdly enough I was just too tired to write. I don't know what phenomenon is at work, but it seems whenever I go on vacation or even just leave my own home environment for more than a day or so, I enter this state of mental and physical inertia. Even though I'm relaxed and get far more hours of sleep than normal, by 10:00 at night I'm dead beat. What is that? You'd think I'd be so energized by all of that rest I'd be pounding on the keyboard until the wee hours.

I did come home with a great story idea. Go figure. It's actually the expansion of a subject that I used eons ago in one of my college creative writing classes. We had to write a short story and share it with the class so they could critique it. I loved my premise, and although I don't remember receiving any glowing praise from my college peers, I always thought it would make a great novel-length story. After sixteen hours of staring at the highway, I've fleshed out something a little more substantial. See, even if I didn't come back with pages or jacked up word counts, I'm still not empty handed.

So, it's good to be back. I now need to get back into a routine. I'm excited that in a little more than three weeks (23 days to be exact), the kiddies will be back in school and I'll have no more excuses not to get busy. Every afternoon, from 12:30 to 2:45, will be dedicated writing time. I'm going to treat it as my job. I sit down at my desk and get the job done. Hopefully by the holidays I'll have something to show for it.

Oh, one bad result of our vacation. We came home to find our PC completely fried. It simply won't turn on. At all. No lights. No noises. Nothing. Completely dead. My husband took it apart last night to discover that the fan seems to work, but otherwise the thing is toast. I'm in a bit of a panic. While I've tranferred pretty much all of my writing stuff to my laptop, there is still a whole lot of stuff in the harddrive of that old machine that I cannot lose. Various notes and writing information I've culled here and there. Hundreds of pictures...

(Time out to say once again that this proves why it is that I just cannot warm up to digital cameras - this is a tragedy of epic proportions should we be unable to recover the last three year's worth of family photos. And don't go on at me about buring backup CDs. I know that now.)

...Software that I've either downloaded or "borrowed" from friends that would be lost forever. Not to mention hours of converted video files I used to use in various projects. We don't have an external harddrive to handle the volume required to do complete system backups, so this stuff could potentially be gone for good.

Really, when I start to think about it, I get kind of shaky. So much for that vacation high.