Sans Michael

Tonight will be the first night I have spent apart from Michael in almost two years. Michael is away on a business trip for the next few days, and it feels very strange to be alone in the house -- even stranger still to think of going to bed alone, waking up alone, and eating my meals alone.

I've been planning to use this time to get a lot of work done. Michael has proved time and again to be an irresistible distraction when I am supposed to be working, so I figured several days without him would be a perfect opportunity to work ahead a little.

Now, I'm not so sure. Dropping Michael off at the airport was much more upsetting than I had imagined -- I teared up when we said goodbye, and actually started crying when he called me ten minutes later to say he'd gotten checken in. When I got home, I didn't feel like doing much of anything: I went outside with the dogs, ate a snack, found the webpage where I could track Michael's flight, and finally settled in to read for a little while. And that's how I've spent the last few hours.

I'm feeling a little better after having read for a while. I'm hoping that I'll be able to shake the gloomy feeling off after a little while and get down to business, but I decided that if I need to take tonight as an "adjustment" period, I might as well let myself have it. After all, I'll have plenty of time to catch up.

I have some goals that I am hoping to meet while Michael is away, of course. I have several projects that I would like to knock out: book reviews, personal essays, (paid) blog posts, and several pages of web copy. More importantly, though, I've decided that it's high time I start pursuing my fiction aspirations again. My goal is to either 1) dedicate a couple of hours each day to writing some fiction, or 2) get everything else done so that I can dedicate an entire, uninterrupted day to fiction. I haven't decided yet which plan is the better one, as they both seem pretty appealing.

Well, I'll post again later and let you know how I'm getting along!