Icy Days and Mondays

Once more, 'tis a Monday. It feels like a Monday already and I haven't even been up that long. When I went out to start my car this morning, I realized that the parking lot of my building had turned into an ice-rink overnight. It was warmer yesterday and a lot of ice started to melt. Naturally, since the temperature dropped below freezing last night, it all froze again. This makes it very difficult to wear my heeled boots that I'm wearing 'round the office this week. Since our company is being sold, our potential buyer (and, hopefully, employer) is in our offices for the next week so we're forbidden to dress the way we normally dress which is to say that we can't just wear jeans and sweatshirts. We're having to look nice and, for me, that means my heeled boots.

So, as has been my habit, I wore my snow boots to start my car and to drive to work. Once again, I ran into my stray. He was not ice-skating around the parking lot. If he had been, I might have been more pleased to see him. The problem is, I can't get away from him. There are at least 25 people in my building. The only one I ever see is him. Don't get me wrong, he's perfectly nice but he's also very friendly. He lives with three other young men and from the sounds of it, they're a little frat-boy-ish, at least judging from the noise that comes from upstairs. They're young. Very young, compared to me. On Saturday, I was coming home and it was almost 12:45 a.m. He was just going out with his buddies and asked me to join them.

Now, it was a nice invitation but here's the thing. I'm in my thirties. Getting in at 12:45 a.m., for me, is really late. I like to go to bed at a decent time and wake up fairly early. I'm not a night owl anymore. Needless to say, I declined. Also, now I feel old. Really old.

My ice-skating stray also likes to knock on my door to see if I want to go get coffee. Again, it's kind of him but being a rather private person, I'm not big on drop-ins. I like my privacy. I lived in a college dorm in which it was normal to knock on a neighbours' door to see if they wanted to do something. Now I'm an adult, I tend to like to have my uninterrupted time at home to do what I want. If I plan something, that's different but when I'm home, I'm home and unless it's someone I actually want to see, I don't like surprise knocks on my door. And yes, I am aware that this makes me into an official Old Grump but, well, it's true.

I should probably defend my grumpiness and remind y'all that I call myself a writer which means I...say it with me now....write. When I'm home and I'm writing, I don't like to be interrupted. It's difficult to get a flow going when there's people around and even a friendly knock on the door can be a stumbling block.

Yesterday, I spent a very long time getting my manuscript ready for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest. It was finished but I had to give it a polish and since I never could hold of my edited hard copy, I had to do it from scratch. On the plus side, I'm really happy with how it's turned out and I think it's definitely my most polished novel. It's the last one I finished which is quite a contrast because I had originally intended to enter the first novel I ever wrote and until two weeks ago, I'd been editing that manuscript like crazy only to discover that losing 15,000 words was just not going to be possible to meet the contest rules. It's amazing how much my writing has changed over the last eight years. It's definitely more mature and I use bigger words now, take the time to describe things rather than rush at the story like there's no tomorrow. I'm not sure what's best, only that I love all of the stuff I've written, especially when it's been edited.

I'm hoping to get it entered tonight. Since I had to get a pitch ready, I got to tweak an already existing query letter and, I have to say, it's better. It means I have another letter to send to agents in hopes that just one of them wants to take a chance on me. If not, well, I suppose I'll just keep trying and hope that the urge to jump off a cliff doesn't strike me during the rejection process. The timing of those cliff-jumping urges can be incredibly bad.

Seriously, though, I'm going to try and be more positive for the rest of the day, even though it's a Monday. It's a new week, a new month, actually. It's the shortest month of the year which means I'm a little closer to my next paycheck and we're a little closer to watching the daffodils bloom amidst the melting snow. As much as I love my snow, there's something cleansing about watching the final heavy layer melt and reveal the refreshed world beneath. As a child, those days were marked by getting to wear knee socks with my skirts rather than the heavy winter tights my mum liked me to wear. As an adult, they're marked by the freshness of a spring breeze, the green of the grass and the buds on the trees.

Yet for now, there's a chance of snow tonight and I'm hoping it will make for more traction on the ice outside my building. In the meantime, I can always hope to find my stray ice-skating outside.

Hey, there's nothing wrong with hope, right?

Happy Monday.