The Two Things Holding Me Back

And how I'm dealing with them.

Hi friends.

I’m back from Mexico. It was a long trip home full of canceled and rescheduled flights and an undignified detour through customs where I whispered to myself, “This is truly a hellscape.” All of which translated to my dog learning the meaning of a good, long day high.

I did get some work done when I was away, mainly because my brain was chewing on a few problems when I slept, so there were several mornings when I woke up and needed to write something down urgently. An idea, a few sentences, maybe a paragraph or two got formed. I let myself not write, though, for the most part (except for a few letters here) because I wanted to shut down all the noise and do a little reboot to see what popped up afterward. Like I needed to know where I was truly at. And my plan has always been to start working on the novel again on December 1, and now here we are, and thus this letter must be brief.

But first I got up and went to the cafe and read for a while and then I walked in the park and, with my early morning crystal clear brain, I thought about what my distractions were. And here are two things that I decided were holding me back from making progress: