Gluttony

This morning, my husband left for the AIA Conference in San Antonio. Although I'd rather hoped to go with him (or that the entire family would go), all the hotels apparently booked up right away, and he has to room up with his business partner. So, much as I love San Antonio, I'm stuck here with the kids and the cats and my work and my writing.

Hold the phone! He's gone until Saturday night? That's almost four full days during which I can write whenever the mood strikes me (provided the kids don't need to be fed, put to bed, or kept from killing themselves or one another, of course). Woohoo!

Okay, I don't want to give the impression that I'm happy my husband's gone. I'm not...exactly. But a spousal relationship does require a certain amount of effort and spending time together, and the muse has a tendency to want to get in the way of that. For some nonsensical reason, my husband doesn't feel my sitting with the computer in my lap while my hands fly furiously (or slowly) across the keyboard while he sits next to me watching the baseball game counts as quality together time. Gosh darn it, he wants my attention!

And of course, I can't blame him. It does not please me at all when he spends the entire evening after work doing something solitary, even if he's sitting right next me while he's doing it. If I don't feel included in whatever it is he's up to, I might as well be by myself. Writing is an essentially solitary experience. You can share the end product with another person, but unless you're one of those rare people who actually writes with someone else, you can't share the act of writing.

For those of us who came to this calling rather late in life or came back to it after a long hiatus, I suspect it's especially difficult for our significant others to adjust to the demands writing makes on our time and (perhaps more profoundly) our attention. I know if I'm feeling the next scene in my story and desperately want to write it, it's nearly impossible for me to be fully engaged in any conversation or interaction with an actual live person who happens to be nearby; the people in my head can scream so loudly for attention at times, they sometimes drown out the real people in my life.

Because I didn't write for so many years, I sometimes feel I pulled a bit of a bait and switch on my husband. I have plenty of faults my husband had ample opportunity to take into consideration before he married me, but my tendency to withdraw into the world inside my head wasn't one of them. And truly, he's NOT against me writing; he'd just rather I didn't do it during our time. That's something I have to respect, because I know I'd feel the same way if he came home every night, shoved his dinner down his gullet, then ran upstairs to hole up and draw architectural plans or paint or do some other hobby that excluded me!

But it also means that when either of us goes on a business trip, I have this tremendous sense of freedom when it comes to writing. Because there's no opportunity for we time, all my free time is me time, and I can do with it what I want.

And so for the next several days, I plan to gorge myself on writing. Oh yeah, I'll do all the necessary stuff. The kids will get to and from school, they won't starve, they'll go to bed on time, and they might even get the odd bath and bedtime story. And I'll get my work projects done. (I have a nasty one due tomorrow that involves writing blurbs for conference sessions, many of which cover topics that can't be fully nailed down for months because the software's in flux. Hmm, how'd I get chosen for this job? We all know I suck at blurbs and hooks!)

But other than that, I'm going into full writing gluttony mode for the next three and a half days. Who needs sleep? That's what caffeine's for! Who needs food? That's what beer's for!

See you all for Lyric Thursday tomorrow (I think Elvis Costello is on the agenda) and probably some incoherent ramblings on Friday (because by then, I'll be running entirely on the caffeine and beer of which I spoke)!