I had planned my day all out. Get up, write this post, go on the monthly Birding Walk with the Master Naturalists, go to the range, make a dessert, do supper with friends…

I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t go back to sleep, my stomach was upset, and after a couple of hours I finally managed to get back towards sleep, just drifting off, and the cats knocked something over that crashed like someone was banging at the door. Well. That set me back a little in that plan. Finally, I turned off alarms as they started to go off to wake me, evaluated where I was at and the amount of driving I planned for the day, not to mention the careful attention I’d need for training… and decided to adjust my plans. I got a couple of hours of sleep, after that. The stomach is still unhappy, but I’ll be sticking closer to home for the rest of the day.

You can’t always manage your plans as you set them out ahead of time. You need back-up plans, or at the very least the ability to know what things are crucial, and what are not. If you can avoid driving while feeling exhausted and sick, for instance, that’s better than forcing yourself to do it when you have alternatives. None of this has to do with writing, directly, other than modeling character behavior, but it does have to do with the state of the writer.

Take care of yourself. There will come a point when cumulative damage becomes so overwhelming that there is no turning back, no quitting bad habits because they may have started the cascade, but are no longer the primary driver that is pulling the slide of collapse downward with them. I’m not talking about me, here. I am talking about some of the thinking in my sleep-addled brain that led me to make changes to my plans and curl up for more sleep because… I needed it. This may not hold for all of you, but sleep is the thing I struggle with, making sure I have enough, but then I feel guilty about possibly having too much, and not getting everything done that I must do. I think most of us have a hang-up about making sure we get what we need, and a fair amount of our wants fulfilled, too. As I’ve been told recently, it’s ok to want things.

I want to write. I’ve been writing most of this week (with the exception of yesterday, which was brutal emotionally even with carefully planned moments of good and cheerful friendship built in). I’m going to write more here in a few moments when I finish up with this post. After all, as my husband told me all these years ago, he’s not a writer. A writer has to write, there’s no choice in the matter, and when a writer, a real writer, isn’t writing they are miserable. Put that way, writing is part of my self-care. Just like getting enough sleep is.

I’ll also take time to make art. I’ve been doing N’Inktober and drawing daily from prompts, and then Sam Robb has been writing stories or scenes based on those drawings. Which has been an impromptu collaboration I’ve delighted in. It has also caused me to adjust what I’m drawing, as I’m composing with that in mind, shaping the art towards being evocative (and feeling bad about one day I could only manage simple, but he took it in a brilliant direction). That sort of adjusting on the fly is an awful lot of fun to do. Improvisation can lead to unexpected discoveries.

While I was working on the art for this anthology, I had a vague idea of what I wanted for the cover. I knew, when I saw the gritty science fiction madonna and child iconography in the image, that I had it. I wasn’t using the main writer as a model, and yes, that looks an awful lot like her. Some things just happen via serendipity. We adjust when our original ideas aren’t as good as the ones we stumble over and realize that we can be better.

We can do better. We can handle a day where nothing is going to plan. We can write if we want to. We can be nimble, and adjust to changes. We just need to allow that to happen when it must.

(header image: Angelic Catfish, pen-and-ink digital drawing by Cedar Sanderson, October 13)