These Dark Days of Autumn Rain

The last time I wrote, it was the beginning of two weeks of school holidays, and I had smugly portioned off 17 days to write a lot of XO, Xena, making up for the nasty illness which pushed me behind schedule.

However! The fates laugh at mortal hubris, especially when it comes to proper timekeeping, and I ended up spending a lot of the holidays in Nelson, keeping my mother company while she recovered from a broken arm. You'd think that these circumstances would be conducive to writing well--lots of time, few distractions, no PS5--but my brain is just not great with disruption. No matter how disciplined I tried to be, there was a lot of sand in the cogs.

Which is to say, I still wrote thousands of words! I'm confident I'll hit the deadline, gods willing and the crick don't rise*. But the next five weekends are going to be a draft-completing slog, and if you find yourself vaguely wondering why you haven't heard from me lately, it's that.

At times like this, I feel less like a person and more like a complex system under stress. I can feel attention and care withdrawing from important-but-presently-less-vital activities (the ironing pile, meal planning, group chats, reading, walking) as my internal resources become dedicated to writing. Or, to put it another way–I feel like a starship that's been hit by enemy fire and has to reassign power from the core. The hydroponics unit is important to the overall health of the ship, but right now we gotta divert everything to shields and the warp drive. There's a klaxon blaring DEADLINE IMMINENT! Everybody's getting flung about the bridge!

You know it's all hands on deck when I bought a Julia Turshen cookbook on Tuesday and it's now Friday and I haven't even opened it yet.

The thing is, I do know what's good for me: Keeping my home clean and relatively uncluttered; cooking and eating lots of vegetables; socialising with my lovely friends; reading, going for a walk whenever it's not raining. (And I bet that most of you in New Zealand nodded ruefully right then. For international readers: Christchurch just went through a 48 hour rainsplosion and our 4th wettest day on record.)

A rain radar image that shows heavy rain over the east coast of the South Island, centred around Christchurch and Banks Peninsula.
Boom.

Diverting power isn't a long term path to anything but system breakdown. But the alarms are going off, and I can do this for a little while. And then, it's gonna be time to dock and make repairs.

Incidentally, one of the ways I coped with disruption over the holidays was compulsively watching all 15 episodes of The Pitt, a wonderful, relentless, very human drama about people trying to do their best for other people over and over again in a horribly broken system that is not being fixed and never stops for repairs. Good show. Recommend it.

See you on the other side of the wormhole!

That Healey Girl is the newsletter of Karen (or Kate) Healey, a romance and speculative fiction author who lives in Ōtautahi, New Zealand and shakes plots loose by wandering along the river. Please feel free to forward this newsletter to anyone you think might like it!

*I spent nearly 90 minutes getting home last night because a lot of roads on my usual route home were closed for flooding, and the rest were crowded. JUST SAYING, sometimes the crick does rise.