Checking in
Seeing my payment for another year of LiveJournal prompted me to come take a look around... hello? is anybody here? I'm trying to figure out how to save my entries as PDFs--I did three years worth with the free version of BlogBooker. Don't really want to pay $20 to do the rest...
Anyway, rereading reminded me that I actually really enjoy(ed) LJ and have lots of good stuff here--so many anecdotes about the kids. The dissertation/teaching years are painful to contemplate, but I got through them. I started a WordPress website before attending RWA the year before last, and I made a resolution to actually put things on it this year, but maybe I'll get back to LJ, too. I was looking at merging the two, but the website is supposed to be a professional writer website, so not the place to dither about personal stuff. (Or at least not as frankly as I tend to on LJ!)
So, the last year or so has been interesting. The girl is in a marvelous, life-saving therapeutic special ed program. She's made SO MUCH progress--is passing her classes, on track to graduate, is slowly figuring out how to interact with peers and has actually made a couple of friends. She has a long way to go still, but the family is basically functional again. OCD still lives here, but it's more of an annoying backseat driver than the captain of the ship. We mostly have bad hours rather than bad days, and not too often. That's the overview...
S is a junior, so there's some talk about college, but it's pretty low key since she'll most likely go the community college --> state school --> ? route. She wasn't able to sit through the PSAT last year, so we had them pull her exam. She took it again this year and, in addition to actually finishing it, did really well! She's signed up for the SAT in March, I think. She's also taking an English AP exam in April. Her grade for the class isn't great since she misses a lot of activities and assignments (she generally goes to about 30-45 minutes of her mainstream classes, then heads back to the therapeutic classroom to recuperate), but the teacher thinks she could get a 5 on the exam. This is all amazing, since when they did the assessments last year as part of her IEP, her cognitive functions were marginal at best. I don't really care what her GPA is as long as her brain is starting to work again! She's also learning to drive--nobody is anxious for her to actually be out on the road with a license, but I feel like it's a good way for her to start adulting without social anxiety being too much of a factor.
We got another dog. S got obsessed with the idea during the darkest hours of her mental health crisis. Naturally, since we would have done almost anything to make her (and the rest of us) feel better, we didn't shoot down the idea. She and her brother earned the money for the adoption fee over the course of, IDK, six months? S earned her share primarily by "beating OCD," so that was a win. Piper is about 10 months old now. We got her when she was about 4 months old, and she was tiny and scrawny--the runt of a litter who almost didn't survive. J and I were privately worried that she would fail to thrive, but she's a healthy, energetic pup now. She's the antithesis of Coda, who is polite, soulful, and respects boundaries. Piper is bouncy, defiant, sassy, standoffish... until you sit down and she jumps in your lap to have a snuggle. Very loving, as long as it's her idea and on her terms. The two dogs play like crazy all day, which gives me a break from being Coda's sole source of exercise and entertainment.
The boy has spent the last year growing, literally. He's six feet tall and not yet 14. He puts minimal effort into school but still has good grades. Really, all he wants to do is play video games, look at things on the internet, and listen to music. He likes to see his friends at school, and he has one buddy who comes over to hang out on Friday afternoons, but he doesn't particularly go out of his way to socialize. If he weren't so sweet and engaged with us I might be a little worried, but he's as good-natured as ever. Given everything this family has been through over the last few years with S's issues, I feel little desire to push him to do more.
J has a new job (well, he started it almost a year ago) that has him working from home three days a week and commuting up to San Francisco the other two days. Objectively, this is a pretty nice schedule, but I've had a really hard time adjusting to it. I've spent a lot of this year feeling overwhelmed an abandoned when he basically goes out of town twice a week, which isn't really rational since he actually gets home before 6 pm on those days. It's just that things have been so dodgy with the girl... psychologically, the thought of him being in another city an hour away makes me panicky. It's better now, though.
I've been writing, despite everything. I've got a contemporary romance ready for rewrites and a contemporary romance with supernatural elements that's had beta reader feedback, rewrites, and is probably ready for professional feedback of some sort. I haven't had the energy to do many of the things you need to do to publish, but I figured putting words on the page was the most essential thing. I sat down and made a writing plan for 2018. I have a lot I want to do, but my end goal is to publish something this year. I'm leaning toward self-publishing (with professional editing and cover art). Life is short, and I don't particularly feel the need for the recognition/approval of the traditional publishing sphere. What I really want is to get better at writing, build a backlist, and make money. Have a career. Network with like-minded people. One thing I have done over the last year is listen to a lot of writing/publishing podcasts, so I feel at least moderately educated and informed as I move forward. I've been reading a ton, too--honing my understanding of the genre.
Enough for now! It's raining, and my fitness tracker is bugging me to get up and move around...