In 2008, I had four jobs, three phone numbers, and six addresses, not counting PO boxes. I had the two best-paying jobs I’ve ever had, and I also had to dig for change for gas and groceries. I sold or gave away almost everything I owned, twice. I went to sell plasma but never got there on time. I was turned down for a job picking okra.

I lived in the middle of a big college town, and on a nature preserve, and in a trailer in the woods, and over my parents’ garage, and in a big echoey house in what everyone called a ghetto but wasn’t, and in a triplex in the suburbs.

I made a pathetic attempt at dating. I made new friends, and instantly fell out of touch with them. I started a novel and a short story, and continued another novel, but didn’t finish any of them. I participated in NaNoWriMo for two days and then got distracted by another move and another new job. And then another move.

I watched too much TV, or none at all. I drank too much coffee. I took up smoking and then quit. I stopped taking antidepressants. I screwed up my internal clock staying up all night reading. Some months I exercised every morning; most I didn’t exercise at all. Some months I tried to eat healthy, some months I ate whatever was available, and some months I lived on powerbars and peanut butter. None of these things seemed to make much difference.

I turned 30 and barely noticed.

I did not travel, except for work and family purposes, and I never left the state of Florida, but I saw an awful lot of interesting and beautiful little bits of the natural world. I took pictures sometimes, and sometimes I didn’t. I read a lot of science books and a lot of bad fanfiction. I spent a lot of time sitting at home doing nothing. I never had both time and money at once, but that’s normal. I listened to a lot of music.

I voted enthusiastically and was overjoyed at the federal elections and disappointed at the local ones. I had long conversations with like-minded people, and guiltily kept my mouth shut around bigots. I learned that kids tend to like me, hippies and intellectuals see me as a kindred spirit even if I’m not quite either, and that I bring out a weird maternal instinct in rednecks, but none of them take me seriously.

And I learned that I’m actually pretty good at change. But I could use a slightly less chaotic year, this time.

Live Long and Marry is an event to raise money to support marriage equality and oppose the amendment coming up for a vote in California. At least 200 people so far are coming together to ply their creative skills and auction off art, writing, crafts, and anything else they can come up with. Ever wanted a hand-knitted scarf or socks made just for you? How about a slash fic featuring your favorite characters? Or a critique of your story from a professional author?

The event was started by fans, and so a lot of fan(fic/art/vids) are being offered, but original fiction and art are also welcome.

Many people are writing and painting and coding and knitting and even baking something for this. While I would love to create something new specially for this event, I’m a slow writer and slower artist, and my creative time is devoted to The Afflicted right now, so I decided to go with something that was already finished:

My listing is here. I’ll be auctioning off both the original and a couple of signed prints. Also, I’ll donate all proceeds from prints of this painting in my deviantArt store to Equality Florida, because we have one of those amendments coming up here too.

So, I encourage anyone to stop by and bid on something they like, or contribute their own talents. I love seeing people coming together for a good cause.

I turn 30 in a month, and I feel like I’m still just getting started on this whole “life” thing. Most of my 20s was spent in school, in the “out of school but unsure what to do next” phase, or in the depths of generalized misery so that all I could really do was plod along — work, sleep, work, sleep. There were a couple of good years in there, but in a way that made things worse — life always sucked ten times more when they ended.

So now I sort of feel like I’ve got at least one foot on the right path, and I’m praying to whatever a Baptist-turned-Pagan-turned-agnostic prays to that I can manage not to fuck it up. Because I am the queen of compulsive fuckups. I can start with a perfect, brilliant, simple plan that has absolutely NO reason to go wrong, and somehow, I never quite finish whatever it was that I started.

Case in point: the science-fiction novel I’ve been working on for a few years now. I had this plan of finishing a novel by age 30. Now I’m facing the fact that that’s not going to happen. Yes, I could conceivably do my own personal summer NaNoWriMo, but since I’m not sure where the story is going anymore, that would just give me another 50,000 words to delete and rewrite when I finally have a plot.

I’m not as disappointed by this as I think I should be. After all, finishing a novel by now has been The Plan for years and years — since college, at least. And it was still the goal at the beginning of this year, while I was mostly unemployed. But then I went and got a real job, and The Plan began its slow, painful death. This job takes up a LOT of my time, not just the 35-hour official work-week, because I did not come in knowing how to do it, and learning is a slow process sometimes, and even my fun reading lately consists of field guides.

This has kind of shoved writing onto the back burner, but it is still on the stove. I haven’t quit writing, I haven’t given up on the idea of being a novelist. I have given up on the idea of writing full-time — it’s just not what I want, in addition to being unlikely — but not on writing altogether.

So, I guess this means I have to find time to write while working full-time, and not just in month-long bursts every fall. I have to find sustainable writing time, something I can stick to indefinitely. That’s hard. I really wish I were one of those people who can live on 3 hours of sleep a night, but no amount of caffiene can keep me functional for more than a couple days of that.

For now, I do most of my writing on Sunday afternoons. And I’m a slow writer on top of that, so progress has been near nil. But, you know, near-nil is not the same as nil. It’s just very, very slow.