I am so nervous I feel like I could puke.

Months ago, my hubby had a horrible shop accident--he smashed his thumb in a press. The best way to describe the way his thumbed looked is to imagine a sausage nuked in the microwave so long that it splits in several places. Now take that image and imagine rolling over the sausage with a rolling pin until it is smashed flat.

Except it wasn't a sausage.

That was my husband's thumb.

It was a mess of bone and flesh and blood, but thanks to the hubby's amazing orthopedic surgeon, it now looks nearly normal except it's kind of flopped over to one side, and so tomorrow Chris is having surgery to have his thumb cosmetically altered so that it will be nearly normal looking. It won't bend at the middle joint, but it will look OK, which is great.

I'm not worried or nervous about his surgery, but more so the after effects of it. He will be in a cast for six weeks again, which means I will have to take on a lot more responsibility--he will be unable to do the dishes or change diapers or fix bottles or give Molly her bath.... etc. and so on and so forth, and so I will be left with those things PLUS my job, and that scares me. I may need to call my shrink to see if he can up the dose on my Prozac. So, yeah, I'm scared, and I hope I will be OK.

NaNoWriMo: Day 14 / Loosing Steam

Sigh. I just don't have the mental power to stay in this race to hit 50,000 words. When I went into this, I only wanted 30,000 words knowing full well that I'm over-extended with responsibilities, but I'm having a hard time just reaching the 15,000 mark. I want to finish what I started, but my brain is so muddled that I feel like I JUST CAN'T DO THIS!

I hate making excuses--I really, really, really do--but today I advised five papers for the EWC, which took me EIGHT HOURS, and after eight hours of sitting and typing and thinking of how someone else can improve their writing just simply DRAINS me of all self-motivation to WRITE for ME.

I only want to slam my laptop closed, unplug my zip drive (where my so-called-novel is stored along with all my EWC documents) and toss it out the window--or, or--better yet, shove it down the garbage disposal with tonight's twice-heated chicken.

But as I write this, I realize that I really, really, really DON'T want to do that--I DO want to finish what I started, I just can't seem to get my Little Engine going in the direction that I want to go, instead of the many directions everyone else wants me to go.

Finally done, and now I'm getting nervous.

I'm finally done, after nearly 3.5 hours, with my last request of the day--for those of you who are reading this, and who do not know me personally, I am an online writing advisor for the University of Maryland's Effective Writing Center (EWC), which means, in a very basic way, I am a student (barely a Sophomore) who advises other students on their writing (and it never ceases to amaze me how I able to do this with so little formal education, but I just can).

And this leads me to say, that I've been sitting in front of this laptop for the last three hours, and it may have been longer than that because my batteries, which last two hours, ran out twice, and I am getting so terribly nervous about HOW IN THE HELL AM I GOING TO FIND THE TIME!! to write 50,000 WORDS!! in ONE!! month with ALL THE RESPONSIBILITIES!! I have??? (Picture me scrunching and smashing my face like Play-Doh right now with my mouth agape.) It just doesn't seem possible, but golly-gee, I just gotta do this. I really have to do this--and not for anyone else, but just for me.