The Breath Before (Personal/Meta)

I had a good week last week in terms of writing, and I hope everyone enjoyed what I was able to bring to the blog. There will be more weeks like that after May 1st. And then there will be weeks even better than that. And then even better. 

This week, however, we have to go off our usual update schedule. 

We're down to the last three weeks before things really start to change. It's been theoretical and hypothetical and "yes, but who knows when" for so long that there's a sense that it isn't actually real. Fourteen months of pandemic are finally drawing to a close. And while many people's pandemics WILL go on while we struggle with vaccine discourse and try to get shots into the arms of everyone, and it'll be a while before anything is back to normal (or even a new normal), my own personal air/fuel mixture of writing to nanny hours is on the brink of starting to go back to where I've spent the last 14 months frustrated out of my mind was simply unattainable. 

Last week both was a rare opportunity and came at a price. My clients on the nanny side were able to give me a reduced schedule, and I sacrificed a lot of other work to keep posted blogs going up. This week is going to be a bit opposite. 

There are now a lot of posts backing up in the queue like Best of and our Book Recommendation Conversation, and given how tough this week is going to be, it's a good time to clean that out. It's clients' payroll, so they need me more than usual, and I get my second Pfizer shot which might be a few days of "effectively" sick. (There's a chance my first vaccine hit, which SUUUUUUUUUUCKED, will be the worse one—that seems to be a common outcome among folks who had Covid—but there's also a chance it will be even WORSE.) Plus I have a few things behind the scenes I still owe patrons. 

There will still be a post every day, and most of you who don't follow our update schedule pretty closely won't even notice. But I like to keep transparent for anyone who thinks that writers don't have wonky weeks or sometimes phone it in a little bit. 

We're in that instant before everything starts to change. That last moment before the jump. When time slows and almost stand still, and you take the one last breath.