While Mondays have, in general, a bad reputation, my relationship with the start of the day!jobs workweek is usually humorous: “Oh Monday, you rascal you!”
Not today. Today both day!jobs were irksome and frustrating and too busy and unexpectedly stinky (thanks to fishy trash bin in the staff kitchenette that wasn’t emptied by janitorial crew on Friday. You know, that day that was three days ago? ohmailawd). It was an acme Monday, straight out of the box with no modifications. By 5pm I was quite literally running out the door of the museum.
But despite that, all I could think about was “I finished the rough draft for Broken Goods! It’s off to my beta reader! I did it!” Because that story has been sitting in a frustrated heap since mid-2012. If you read this blog ever then you know that 2012 is “The Year that Shall Not Be Named” and is responsible for putting my writing career into the (drunk) tank. Hauling through finishing up Broken Goods and making it into a good story was hard, because for me it was old news. But I clawed my way through rewrites and wrote expanded scenes and it ended at a 60k words–fairly respectable I’d say!
The reason a “Monday, Monday” brought those thought to the fore was this: life is too short to live without a passion for living.
My day!jobs are okay. They are within my professional field and I dearly love all my co-workers, something not many people can say. But the passion? The drive? The willingness to slog through the drudgery and hack through the stumbling blocks and fight for what is right?
Nope. Not there.
I think the best phrase I’ve ever read is “If you want to know where your heart is, look to where your mind goes when it wanders.”
My mind, it wanders free in stories I create. That’s where it goes, and where it wants to stay. Getting Broken Goods into a “completed draft” form represents to me a return to where my heart is.
So bring it, Monday! Whatever you throw at me, slides off. I’m tired and I’m stressed and I’m broke, but that’s just a phase. I’m working on bigger and better things than a silly old Monday.
