Free Falling Saturday - my inner Larry is making me crazy

I'm not free falling today. I'm driven. Yes, I'll admit it - driven. I have that look like Darren on Bewitched before a big presentation when his boss Larry (whoa I remember waaaay too much of this) would be looking over his glasses and frowning. Because it was tough for poor poor Darren (who I despised even as a twelve year old) to put up with his crazy witchy wife and deliver the goods in the ad biz. Yep. That's me. And what exactly is driving me? Only my own deadlines and goals. My inner Larry you might say. I don't have an outer Larry or any sort of Larry at all. I don't have a boss, a board, or any external person with a stick. I'm self-employed as a therapist and obviously I'm self-employed as a writer. Did you know that all of us writers MUST be entrepreneurs. We might hate that part of our life but it is true - we are. I have developed this inner Larry who frowns at me over his glasses when I've let him down. When I haven't delivered on the day I promised to. It is fairly straight-forward with the therapy practice - don't show up - don't get paid. Don't phone people back - don't get paid. There. Easy. But in my writing practice or my housework practice or my gardening/kid driving/cooking/egg getting/old person visiting/concert going practice I do not have such an obvious stick. So I've developed this inner Larry and he drives me. Right now he's really going at it. Here's what he is on about:

BuNoWriMo - or the Burrowers' equivalent to the National Novel Writing Month which occurs in November. We Burrowers do it in June - it is spring and some of us are teachers and November is wrong for us. I started out saying I would do a half-marathon - 25 thousand of the usual 50 thousand - as I have revision work to do and a house to sell - but later on I changed my mind. Three days ago exactly. I decided that I was on fire and had done my 25 and wanted to keep going. No surprise - I've been revising forever and needed a writing project to get me feeling like a creative person again instead of a drone. So there are 31 days in June and that means - wait while I get my calculator out - 1,613 words a day. I should have 25,808. I have 27,221 so I'm a bit ahead. I want to get far ahead this weekend. No reason not to except the house selling thing. I don't have one thing other than two performances by the step-dot this weekend - in a cabaret and at the conservatory - but other than that - no body coming for dinner, no skype therapy - oh gosh, maybe one but that is only an hour. I've been up since 6:30 - already done a thousand plus words and it is 9:30. So all good here. But driven. Because it is a new book - oh the name changed - it is called Crossing Bright Angel - I like it tonnes. So yes, driven because it is new and fresh and I like it and I want to write while the heat is upon me. I'd rather do that than anything else today but...

Getting House Ready - I've been doing this for weeks and weeks. Lots has been done but it seems endless because of course - big surprise - WE ARE STILL LIVING (eating, bathing, washing, reading, producing garbage) HERE! And because, if I might gripe a teeny bit - I seem to be the only person around here who gets what getting the house ready for sale means. I don't want the rooms I've already super cleaned to get dirty again. So they are the more private rooms that don't get quite as much traffic. I still have to do the bigger public rooms - the living/dining/kitchen space etc...all the floors need to be washed and waxed. All the debris swept up. I have planted a zillion planters but I have another bunch to go. These are for the new nice deck which still needs a little work. Those of you who have carpenter mates need no explanation here but for you others - the rule is that nothing is ever quite done so you can't clean it up and put nice things on it cuz it still needs another board, another coat of varnish/paint/stucco/whatever. Arggh. In writing terms this is the revision process and as I've said - I am quite sick of it. Let's just call it done. Well it will have to be called that by Monday evening. That is when an agent is coming to look at it and tell us what she thinks. Nervous? Yes. This house is like my novels - lots of work put into them - not much financial reward yet. I am truly hoping that it fetches what I think it is worth - but doesn't everyone feel that way about everything they've created? So you can see that Larry is really on me about this one.

General Worry about Feckless Life - Yes, Larry is huge in this department. Why, he moans, can't you take care of your adult responsibilities (paying bills, keeping receipts, phoning people back, etc...)? I don't know, I answer looking down and kicking my feet like the four year old I am. It's borrrrrring, I whine. Then I wake up at five in the morning wondering who the hell is going to take care of me since I obviously won't do it? Larry hates my feckless self. He hates that he has to wake me up but he knows I'm weak at five AM and might believe that I'm really in trouble and need to get down to it. NOW! Okay, I'm going to leave this topic. Everyone has their own version of this I'm sure. Let's just say that I'm not going to regret not smelling the roses. The roses have been smelled - they just haven't been paid for or taken care of properly.

Now I'm going to go write another thousand words and then I'm going to plant my planters. I'll knock off some of the things on my to-do list and make Larry shut the !@#$ up.