M is for Me, who suffers from malaise...

The final draft of my first class essay and a "self-assessment" on the writing process and what I got from the feedback session are due tomorrow. Then I start writing essay number two, which is a "place" essay, and which I have even less of a germ of an idea for than I did the first one. Meh...

Over the weekend I had to scramble to finish the story I'd been brainstorming all last week in time to meet the NYC Midnight Short Story deadline of midnight Saturday night. Since my husband had family very unexpectedly come into town, there was a little bit of panic as I had planned to use the free time on Friday night and Saturday during the day to polish and edit. I skipped a family dinner Friday night in order to work on the story...which didn't get me as far as I had hoped, so when Saturday came around and I still had a little left to finish, but we had social plans, I was getting a little stressed. It wasn't helped by my husband's apparent unhappiness at having to deal with me trying to figure out how to get the story submitted from someone else's house. It worked out, and I got it uploaded just under the wire (by literally a couple of minutes), but it opened my eyes to the fact that if I decide to freelance, and if I make steps to "become a writer" full-time, it is something I will have to manage with as little disruption to certain other people's plans as possible.

I had really hoped for a little more understanding and support on the spousal side - which, I did get when I decided to stay home from dinner on Friday night, but come Saturday, I was being rushed and had to listen to a lecture about how he thought I was finished, and I was holding him up and how annoyed he was...I decided not to bring up the two years he worked in radio where he had to be at the station by 5:00 pm and how difficult that was at times for his family to schedule get-togethers around and how often he ended up having to leave early because of his second job. I am resigned to the fact that "supportive" is a word that means exactly that when it doesn't affect the other person in any way that they perceive as being negative. This issue did nothing but cause me to second-guess whether writing is something I want to actively pursue (questioning whether it's "worth the hassle" the disruption and resulting domestic tension that having to make concessions to writing deadlines will cause), and now I'm full of self-doubts.

I have to wait what feels like an excrutiatingly long time to find out whether I even advanced to the 2nd heat in the short-story challenge...