Monday Morning Reset [06/26].

A strange but lovely thing happened this morning: I slept in to my alarm. For the past week or so, I’ve been waking up well before my alarm clock, a strange phenomena that has me going to bed a little bit earlier each night, which makes my body naturally awaken after a certain amount of time, even if that means earlier than I’d like. It’s usually a bit of a blessing, since that just gives me more time to do things in the morning, but after finally breaking the streak in getting up at the intended time this morning, I’ve got to say, I really liked the extra sleep!

That doesn’t have much to do with anything. I mostly just wanted to use it as a way of getting started on my usual Monday Morning Reset, where I get started on a few new things, hopefully finish up some things from the last week, and take a look at how things are coming along.

Reading: I still haven’t managed to finish up Missing People as intended, but I’m getting closer! This week, I’ll nail it down for sure. Since it’s summer, I’ve also added Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine to the Pile’O’Books, as I wanted to make it a Summertime Staple to inspire me through this particular season. It’ll be a joy to read through it again, and it’ll hopefully inspire me to get out to the parks whenever I can.

Writing: It’s been an interesting week for writing, and by interesting, I mean a little demoralizing. Four rejections flooded in throughout the week, merciless and swift, upping my kill count to 61. And no acceptances for June yet, either. I’ve always been pretty positive about things like this: I actually am sort of eager to reach my goal of 100 rejections, but, man, it can hurt pretty badly to go too long without some good news. I want to hold my breath for a few stories that have been held for a while (sometimes that means something, sometimes it means nothing), but I don’t want to get my hopes up, especially since one of these is a story I really love but I’ve had a really, really hard time placing somewhere.

Ah, well. Time will tell. I just have to keep trying. On the bright side, I finally finished this really neat story I wrote about a girl who has literally lost her mind, so I’m looking forward to typing and prepping that one to send out, and this morning I’ve started another potential entry for an anthology that deals with Japanese myths and the tanuki. Not sure what I might try to finish this week, maybe that one if the writing goes well.

‘Rithmatic: Not much else to report on; things are settling back into place nicely after my visit from my mother, which was a lot of fun but also pretty exhausting, and I know she’ll agree with me on that. One thing of particular note that we did was swing by the new American Writers Museum, by suggestion of my boyfriend, and it was a real treat. I honestly didn’t know what to expect, and I was really pleasantly surprised. It’s a small space, but they’ve done a wonderful job of making it really immersive and interaction, with a lot of really neat information on various authors, interactive games, old typewriters to play around with, and, one of my favorites, a neat little system where you can enter in your favorite author and their books, and it keeps a tally of how many other guests may have picked the same things you did. They also had the original scroll manuscript for Jack Kerouac’s On the Road on display, which was just really cool to see. One of these days, I’d love to attempt something like that, just a long stream of consciousness novel, nearly non-stop for a few days, just to see what comes out. The price of admission prevents it from being something I’d visit often, but it was definitely worth it to experience it the first time around. I didn’t know what to expect, but I know I didn’t expect to have that much fun there. Very cool little exhibit.

And now I’m off to go try to find a home for another story before dragging myself to dumb old work. Happy reading, everyone!