Total word count this week: 504 words. Grand total after three weeks: 2492 words.

Perhaps I should have made my goal a teeny bit lower.

I’ve made peace with my need to set the bar higher than reasonable. Have I learned my lesson? Maybe. Ask me again in July when the next session of camp comes around and I decide the night before that I’ll be able to write/revise way more than I allow myself time for.

It has been a stressful few weeks at work. I’m not sleeping well. Schedules shift with the season, and change makes me anxious.

But.

Tonight is a gorgeous spring evening. I dropped kiddo off at his last indoor soccer practice, walked down the street to a local coffee shop, and am sitting in the warm late day sun, happy to breathe fresh air and have these precious moments to spend with words and a delicious cup of ginger mint tea.

Life brings me down sometimes. Tries to pull me under with both the mundane and the soul crushing. Writing has always been an escape. For years I journaled, poured my teenage/early twenties angst onto page after page, book after book. Wrote poems that I read now and have to laugh at the shear drama of it all. When life stopped requiring regular mental purging, I turned to fiction and found release in the stories of people who took up residency in my brain. (Apparently they didn’t get the memo that it’s crazy in there.)

Sometimes, writing brings me down too. The pressure I put on myself to write more, write better, find an agent, get published. Create a brand.

You know what I’d like my brand to be?

Balance.

Me, standing in tree pose, roots firmly in the Earth, hands extended to the sky. Strong. Not falling over. Giving love to my family, my friends, myself. Giving my all at work, but then leaving it there. Giving my all on the page, but not worrying about perfection. Getting into nature and being one with the sights, the smells, the sounds. Dancing when the music moves me. Being still.

I sat down once this week to work on my new project. Distractions continue to haunt me, brought on by fatigue, a lack of self-discipline, time. It’s okay. I wrote once, and once is better than nonce. I’m happy with how things are going and feel like I have a decent amount of momentum. There is one final week left in camp, and this week is crazy busy, so I don’t see a miraculous race to the finish happening.

But.

My camp mate is coming in from out of town at the end of the week. The three members of our cabin along with a couple other awesome writing peeps are getting together. I can’t think of a better way to celebrate the end of this mini journey.

Sometimes you sit alone in a coffee shop (or outside of one) and type away into the void, and sometimes you hang out with friends and laugh until your sides hurt. I expect to do a bit of both this week.

Balance.