Big Days Ahead!

 I have a bit of sorting to do with Dameon still. Just going to bag up the clothes we went through that he doesn’t want and then start going through the toys/collectibles today.

Tomorrow is closing day! Dad will do a walk-through to make sure the house is good to go, sign a giant stack of paperwork and get the keys. We won’t start the moving process until he returns from a trip with friends this month, but that’ll give us some time to do all the final packing and be ready to start the big haul.

Dad said he’s been doing some driving through and around our new town and is already drooling about how beautiful it is. I can’t walk for the walks and drives ahead to familiarize myself with all of it. I even went and added some of the local FaceBook groups to my feed, get a better feel for the bad and the good for people there. Apparently, the worst problem I’ve seen is FedEx’s tendency to deliver to the wrong addresses there. Our house's mailbox is actually on the other side of the street, so I’ll be adding some special delivery instructions to deliver it onto my porch whenever possible. The house number is big and clear on the house, but it’s not super close to the road. 

I constantly daydream about what life will be like there, the way I’ll arrange my room and decorate and make it our own. Nothing too fantastical, but I have snippets of our tour and where we drove in and I’ve pored over maps to see which ways I’d like to explore. I’ve always dreamed about an abstract home, somewhere between rural and suburban life, and this will be a surreal reality to come.

Not to say it won’t come without adjustment. Change is always a little scary too. Some of us live our lives afraid to make change and I can’t say I blame anyone for that. Some changes mean you can’t go back to way things were and, when the new situation is worse, it makes it all the more difficult to trust making big changes again.

Yet I remember how difficult it was to hit ‘publish’ on my first book. I drafted and edited and riddled with the cover and proofing, backed up to make adjustments required, learned all of the pitfalls of word processor formatting. I kept meticulous notes so that future efforts would be more streamlined. Yet as the excitement built, that dread crept in.

What if people hate it?

It wasn’t a dread that I cared to let build so I squeezed my eyes shut and clicked. 

The harsher reality is that most people didn’t care to read it or even know it existed. But I moved on. More books, each coming with some new challenges in the ever-changing processes. I didn’t even get my first review until this year, a very in-depth one, but I lapped it up. Feedback is golden, especially in a time where people consume and move on, rarely ever taking the time to interact with those who made the work they take in. I adored the honesty and the criticism and strive for more of it, good bad and ugly, in the future.

I would still like to organize to get some booths at local conventions, but in light of the pandemic, I’m not certain about making too many plans in an unknown future. Events are still being cancelled these days and I don’t want to accumulate any space-hogging racks or displays too far in advance. I’ve kept many suppliers bookmarked, ready to order when it’s time, but in truth, there’s still much work to be done and my muse is playing hooky these days. I know I’ll have to reread my previous two books in the series and comb over my notes to proceed. It’s too easy to forget when nearly a year has passed without drafting it. When you have a brain constantly processing many ideas, you have to be in a place to discipline it once more.

In any case, this moving adventure takes precedence. I’ll likely be straddling living between this house and the new one until the end of the year, fiddling with nesting in a new room and settling in. It may just be the sort of task that has my muse sniffing around in curiosity once more. There are also plenty of crochet and doll projects in process, so there’s really no telling where I’ll go from here.

Truly, it’s not a bad problem to have.