John Lennon once said in a song: Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.
Ain’t it the truth!
And when life happens, it’s generally out of the blue ...
Life has happened in my family recently, and the end result is that my elderly mom will be coming to live with us.
I’m really excited about it, but there’s lots of work to be done before the fun part happens ... whole rooms of our house are getting switched around ...
First, Room A, where mom’s going, is where my studio is now. So all the studio stuff is going to an area in Room B, which is smaller than the area I had. I lost a whole wall because there’s a built-in bookcase in Room B. So that has to be unloaded so I can set up a useable work space.
I also had to send my big light table to the basement and get a new drawing table, which is nice, but substantially smaller, so the bottom shelf of the bookcase will need to suffice for an area to lay drawings in progress.
The closet and some cabinets in Room B will need to be cleaned out and reorganized, because the closet in Room A needs to be completely empty for our new guest’s use. Plus I have no clue where all the books from the bookcase are going.
Furniture that used to be in here has now been dragged into there, and storage in there has now disappeared and I’ve no clue where I’m gonna’ put the stacks of stuff that sits waiting for a new home.
I did a good job of moving the computer wires ... a whopping 6 inches to the other side of the wall! I did it one Sunday afternoon and was feeling so smug, because when I plugged it all back up, everything worked! Then Monday morning, looking at that rat’s nest of wires behind my desk, I got the brilliant notion to neaten things up ... bad idea, because then we were without internet and TV for 3 days! I have no clue what I did! I did still have my computer, scanner and printer, thank goodness, but for necessary communication with the world, I had to load files onto a flash drive and rent a computer at FedEx.
In the middle of all that, I’m trying to keep up my normal work routine, but it’s a challenge. When I’m working, that unfinished room is calling to me ... and when I’m trying to clean out a closet, the work beckons. And until my mom gets here, my sister and I are trying to get one of us to her house for a few hours daily ... I’m a bit overwhelmed! Getting through it, but still ...
Then this month I posted a new article about typesetting picture books. I write all these articles about printing, and drawing, and producing books with the idea in mind that it might help some self-published author maneuver through the process ... and I wonder if those authors get overwhelmed, too.
I have this sweet vision of my mom in her fresh, comfortable room, and long talks on the back porch, her watching and helping me draw books – got my talent from my mom! It’ll happen, but there’s a lot of work to be done before it does.
Just like my sweet vision of my mom, I know new authors have sweet visions of their stories coming to life ... to see a real book with their name on the cover, that a reader will open and read words that they wrote ... readers who hopefully will laugh and cry in all the appropriate places ... readers whose lives will be affected in profound ways ... all because that author wrote it all down ... but there’s a lot of work to be done before it happens.
So this has been a real challenge, but no more of a challenge than what you’re dealing with, too. So let’s both just take it one step at a time. One day, despite the aggravations we’re dealing with today, we’ll be laughing about downed internet and trying to figure out what a printer needs.
Keep your sense of humor and a good perspective on things, and keep taking that next right step ...