Tuesday, July 26, 2011

July 26th

It's hard to believe that August is less than a week away.

I've enjoyed my Georgia summer immensely so far, though it did nearly give Keith and I a heart attach when Georgia Power Company doubled their electricity rates without notice.

We thought the meter must have gotten struck by lightning. Sadly, no.

Keith is enrolled in a military school that is outrageously difficult. I glanced over his shoulder at his work and my head spun. It's all math, and firing angles and positions and I don't even know what.

All but five students in the entire building, not just Keith's class, have so far failed at least one test. There seems to be about two tests per day. If you fail once, you can retake it the next day, as well as taking the regular tests for that day. If you fail again, you're out of the school.

A lot of people have failed out of the school. Keith was up at three thirty this morning, to study. He didn't even watch TV last night. He came home, sat at the table, and studied.

He is focused.

I looked over at him last night, sitting with his sock feet drawn up under the dining room chair, his heavy shoulders hunched forward, absently munching on his sandwich as he studied, and I felt so much love for him. He's not studying for the grades or the awards; he's studying because passing this school represents a door opening for our future.

"This is our life," he told me soberly.

I feel kind of frivolous, with my lovely long days and my freedom from obligation. Pretty much, if I pay the bills on time, cook dinner and wash his PTs, I'm good. Lately, I've been stepping up my game though, so I can do my part. I'm not sure how helpful polished furniture is, but it's polished.

I finally worked on Torii a little bit last night. It drew me back in. I had put that story aside in order to do a quick, anxiety based line edit of Ceallach, initiated by the sending of the query letter.

Also, I realized that if I switch the view option to "reader," it tricks my brain into thinking that it has never read those words before.

My brain is all "Hey! What have we here? It's new stuff! Exciting!"

And then I can catch all kinds of small mistakes, like verb tenses and tangled sentence structure and bad flow.

 A good friend dropped me a line yesterday to point out that what I had actually been saying, in my last post, was that I had the chest of drawers necessary to try and get my work published.

Oops.

Clearly there's a world of difference between bedroom furniture and man parts in reality, but in word form, just one vowel distinguishes them.

The pitfalls that face the unsuspecting and amateur writer are legion.