I learned a valuable lesson this week: I should have painters come to my house every day, like I did this week. It’s been the best thing that could’ve happened for my writing (and this in a week that includes a 3-hour coffee date with a new friend and an early school dismissal for my kids). Seriously, not being able to access the kitchen or the laundry room (you know I’m sobbing about that last bit) has forced me to practice the Butt-in-Chair philosophy I admire so much in more disciplined (and less frenetic) writers.

I whipped through several article drafts; completed two audio transcriptions; finished polishing my Purpose Letter for my grad school application; hammered out the rough draft of another post; and selected and collated the writing samples I need to submit along with my application. (I laughed out loud when I saw that the samples I had chosen added up to precisely the 40-page submission limit. Whee! I love it when things end up like that!)

Lesson learned: If you stop eating and worrying about wearing clean clothes, you can sure accomplish a lot in a day. Here endeth the lesson.

The cool part about pulling those writing samples is that some of them are things I haven’t looked back at for a while. After living and breathing Widow Woman, sitting down to try to narrow down a few key pages for my sample felt surreal. I mean, I know I wrote the darned thing, but when you don’t look at something for a long time, it no longer feels like it’s yours.

I included a short story I wrote, along with excerpts from my two novels-in-progress. The YA novel, The Water Bearers, is one I’m working on all the time, and it’s the one I just submitted to my new writers’ group for (a very helpful and insightful) critique, so I didn’t experience any out-of-body experiences looking that one over again. I’ve got some work to do to polish the sample, so it feels very now, very present. But my second novel, well, I haven’t looked at that one in almost six months, and I’d sort of forgotten how much I loved where it was going–I felt giddy going back to it, and can’t wait to get both my writing application and my first (technically, second) novel completed so I can get back to it again.

Oh, well–looks like I’d better find something else for my painter to work on–maybe he can paint my office door shut.

Love being back to work. 🙂