Progress Report

I had three goals for my trip to Florida:

1. See sunlight.
2. Finish essay about trip to India
3. Finish chapters on boobs and period for memoir

I am happy to report that I did see sunlight. It has been very lovely. I wrote outside in both sun and shade. I have not, however, seen any octopi in the ocean. (I had to throw that in there so I could use my cool octopus label. Sorry.)

Also, I finished a shareable draft of my essay on my trip to India. The essay started out two weeks ago when I copied and pasted all of my blog posts from the trip into one master document and wrote a new intro. Unfortunately, it was 10,000 words and I was aiming for 2,000. The good news is that once I cut all the parts where I said nasty things about people, plus the parts where I repeated myself ad nauseum, and the things that were just totally inappropriate (for example, my fear of shitting my own pants at the Taj Mahal), I got it down to 8,000 words. I edited that sucker on Tuesday afternoon and all day on Wednesday, bringing it to 4,600 words. The Husband made the really hard cuts that I knew had to happen but couldn't force myself to do. With that, I am at a reasonable 2,664 words. I turned to my writing group for help. Hopefully, they can suggest 664 words to cut and I'll be in business.

As for the memoir, I better get my ass in gear tomorrow. The main problem is that when I get back to New York, I am starting a part-time consulting gig with the city's main child care agency. This will pay me money and assuage my guilt about not utilizing my do-gooder skills for the last six months, but also severely hamper my time to write in May. (At the end of May, my fourth month commitment to Bugaboo magazine ends, so that will open up some time for me.)

So that's what's up. I give myself a B or B- minus on the writing retreat accomplishments, and a D for the overall sabbatical that I continue to sabotage by taking on other projects out of fear or guilt.