One Writer's Rationalization: Why Being Sick For a Week is Good Thing

E missed the entire week of school last week.

An entire week.

Normally, I'm able to write through E's illnesses. Not this time. The round-the-clock nursing required to keep E comfortable sapped me so completely that the need to sleep when E did trumped any hope of working on KM. I lived with this--accepted it as an inevitable part of my process--until Thursday or so when a mutated form of E's bug infected P and I.

Then I got mad--or would have--if I hadn't felt so crappy.

So, instead of spending the weekend catching up on writing and promised SCBWI-Illinois work, I hacked and coughed and tagged-teamed with P for the right to crawl under the covers, all the while attempting not to reinfect E.

One saving grace: E continued to get better despite our rotating sick ward.

Another saving grace: Friday's teen writer's group was a hoot, and the library asked us to extend our run indefinitely. Woohoo! A paying gig. How cool is that?

And yet another: This most recent illness of E's was her first sick week for the school year, making a comparison to last school year statistically remarkable. By this time last year, E had missed multiple weeks, enough that by the end of the school year illness had kept her away 25 percent of the time.

Hear that KM characters? In a weird warped way, the fact that last week was the first E missed this school year is encouraging news. Good news. Fighting news.

And now that we're all in a fighting mood, there's the matter of the sub for next week's crit group. Before we can finish it up I need to face my inner critic. It escaped its cage last week, and is more than a bit feisty about being returned to it.

So, I need a favor of sorts. Shouldn't take long, and might even be therapeutic. Take up a sword (there are plenty of them laying about the stage of the story) and help me subdue this foul beasty.