a bit of sunshine

The teacher I'm working with said I actually did a pretty good job yesterday, considering the circumstances. We were working with a bigger, less focused class because we had kids whose teacher was out sick. The teacher and I have been e-mailing back and forth, working on strategies for next Monday. So all is not lost. I feel fired up again.

Full disclosure: I've been pretty blue lately, hence the lack of posts. I could attribute it to a number of things. The catalyst was my second book idea falling through. For the last year or so I've been putting a lot of thought and energy (and, in all honesty, elaborite fantasies about the book's greatness) into the idea, and when I set it aside I was left with a sizable void. Add to this some very real uncertainty about my financial situation past late summer 2006 (until my final payment comes in upon release of Cross-X on August 22), and you have a legitimate case of the blues.

And some other things happened which added to the funk. My financial fears got me playing the magazine game again, which has always been depressing for me. It really is a game. You throw out an idea. Nine times out of ten they don't want the idea, but they reject it in a friendly way. So you take that as an invitation to toss out more ideas. And back and forth you go, trying to figure out what these damned editors want. Rejection. Rejection. Rejection. It's hard noot to let it get to you.

This month I've finally gotten some assignments -- the biggest of which won't be running until next October. But these are pretty well kknown magazines, and they pay well, so it feels like a breakthrough.

My duldroms really deepened, though, when I read Jared Diamond's Collapse. It made me feel like a planet-ruining glutton. For the past several days everything -- literally everything -- about my life has felt evil. That's not a great place ot be.

But today I went for a run and somehow that snapped me out of it. Suddenly this new book project I'm working up made sense and I had a clear conviction of my commitment to it. And with that came energy to do all the little life stuff I didn't have energy lately to do. I went ot Central this afternoon and we hada relatively productive practice.

So what needs to happen is that I need to force myself to run at least every other day.