Haven’t blogged or tweeted or much of anything in a while. Way behind in answering my email, too. Too busy, too grumpy, too just plain tired.

Dave’s bookstore, The Other Change of Hobbit, had to relocate, and most of my weekends and evenings for the last month and a half or so have been spent helping out with that — packing boxes, moving boxes, unpacking boxes, putting up bookcases, putting up signs in the window, and so on. But the bookstore is open in the new space now and I’ve started having some time again in the evenings and on the weekends for doing laundry and writing and sleeping and stuff.

I’ve been frustrated at not making a lot of progress on the new play I’m supposed to be working on. I was very excited to start on it and then just a couple of weeks after I started, I started spending every available hour helping with the move and could work on the play only in scattered quarter-hours and half-hours here and there. There may be writers who can do that well but I find it very difficult. When I sit down and start to work on a piece of writing, it often takes me a while to get into it, to face down the demons and stop hating the sound of my own writing, and stop worrying that what I’m working on is embarrassingly bad and I’ll never finish it and even if I do, nobody is going to want to perform it, and stop worrying that there’s going to be some technical problem in the next scene that I haven’t yet noticed that makes the whole story impossible to tell on stage, and stop wondering if maybe I’d be more successful by now if I’d gotten into writing novels instead and maybe it isn’t too late for me to make the switch. If I only have 20 or 30 minutes here and there, I feel like I’m always having to stop just when I’m finally getting started, over and over again.

But in the last week I’ve had a little more time, and things seem to be starting to flow a little better again. And the two and a half scenes I’ve written so far do seem very, very good to me.

Plus I’ve been getting more sleep, always a good thing.