Prioritizing

For various and sundry reasons both practical and metaphysical, I am in the process of performing an informal cost-benefit analysis on my day-to-day activities and prioritizing them accordingly.

This basically means I intend to spend more time blogging and reading Tony Hillerman novels (shhhh … don’t tell Ron, but I think I’m secretly in love with Lt. Joe Leaphorn of the Navajo Tribal Police) and less time playing Angry Birds and Facebooking about overpriced decaf.

I doubt I’ll blog every day — I’m not sure I can swing it, and daily blogging tends to produce a lot of useless filler — but I do intend to post more regularly than I have in the past few months, and I hope what I post will be worth the bandwidth it takes to load the page.

With that in mind, here’s another photo from our recent trip to New Mexico. I think photos from New Mexico are always worth the bandwidth. 🙂

Remember that novel I was working on last year? I finished the first draft in February and am now in the process of rewriting it. One of my goals on this trip was to soak up inspiration for that project. I got more than I bargained for when life imitated art: One scene in my novel has the narrator, Sierra, sitting in the lobby of an old motel on Route 66 in New Mexico, watching a thunderstorm blow in — so you can imagine my delight when I found myself standing in front of the long-shuttered Western Motel in San Jon, watching a storm blow in and realizing that every single detail was exactly as I’d described it in the novel.

Suffice it to say that “finish second draft” moved from the bottom of my to-do list to a spot near the top, right under planning next week’s lessons and cleaning the bathroom (which is starting to resemble a Superfund site). If all goes according to plan, I’ll be able to rewrite a few chapters Monday night, as the IronPigs’ playoff series against Columbus doesn’t start until Tuesday.

Emily