The Glamour of a Writing Life

More on the author’s glamorous life…

What? You didn’t know I had one?

Yesterday I engaged in Extreme Ironing and today I need to clean the house before I go away on a professional trip for two weeks. I’m attending Fencon and then staying over to teach a workshop in Bedford, TX. In between I hope – away from kids and cats and assorted other interruptions – to finish several works that are hanging by at thread and perhaps to get some sleep.

I know half of you are going to think it’s weird that I am engaging in housekeeping before leaving and the more daring of you will accuse me of being a downtrodden woman. Very funny. The truth is that our entire family is what can be euphemistically described as “driven.”

My husband, very generously decided to forego the chance to pursue his own artistic ambitions, so I could – sixteen years before I published a novel – which meant if we still wanted to have a comparable lifestyle to our peers, I picked up a lot of the slack. This involved a lot of stuff like ironing and cooking from scratch (yes, I know, but I REALLY cook from scratch) which is considered female-like and exploitative. It also includes furniture refinishing, wall painting and a lot of the other stuff. As for my husband, in addition to his more than 9-5 job he maintains all the computers in this house (I think ten, at last count) and does the taxes which take an unreasonable amount of time because my business is neither easy nor straightforward. Now we’re also trying to phase in some time for his writing, because it’s been years (since the kids became old enough to take considerable time) since he’s been able to do anything with it, and he’s really very good.

As for the kids, they’re teens and prickly, so I won’t go into their lives, but I think Robert is engaged in three or four different “enterprises” as well as keeping a 4.0 in pre-med, and Marsh is doing two or three things in addition to half/college and senior year in highschol, which these days seems to involve a year of sending out applications to colleges, each with the administrative/bureaucratic work load normally associated with filing a brief before the supreme court.

Our lives slot together very precisely to allow us to spend time together and to keep up with our conflicting commitments. That means if one of us is going to be away or incapacitated, it can throw everyone off. Papers don’t get filed with schools, novels get delayed or – and this is usually what happens when I get really sick – the house becomes the sort of screaming mess that takes me months to unravel afterwards.

Since this is not unexpected, I’m leaving some stuff done in advance, and then leaving them with specific charges on what to do. (Because I’m the one at home most of the time, I’m, by default, the manager.) Yes, they can iron (though since I got da machine, they don’t know how to operate that!) and they can clean and they can cook, but not to MY standards without supervision. And I don’t want to come back, after a con, and have to spend a week cleaning. So, today, I set things in order for them.

… which means I really don’t feel like writing a blog post, though it looks like I have…

So, I’ll close off with some stuff about the workshop.

The workshop is to help the Bedford library. (They pay my plane ticket, the rest goes to them.) I’ve done this three times and it’s a lot of fun. I honestly don’t have any idea if it’s full up or not, but if you’re going to be in the area it’s September 30^th to October 1^st. I have no idea how enrollment is this year, but if you’re in the area, look at http://www.bedfordlibrary.org The info should be there somewhere, and if it’s not send them an email.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, I have catboxes to clean.