Need vs Want

Dear Internet,
When I came home from work today, I found myself bemused in my driveway when I realized I had not thought of or worked on my NaNoWriMo story at all today. Now that I’m getting back to working five days a week instead of three, I’m still working on a schedule to make everything fit. I’ve also taken on a part-time gig for a committee work I’m involved with at MPOW, which I have to also get cracking on as well this weekend.
Balance.
Our plans for the evening was to head to a concert, which we ended up bailing on as TheHusband wasn’t feeling well and I was feeling tired. My body seems more delicate then I remember it ever being, which seems exacerbated by the complications of my recovery from my arthritis surgery in June. If you’re not following me on across the usual haunts, the tl;dr version is this:

June 28th, I had arthritis surgery on my right ankle to remove nearly 20 years of bone chip/spurs from my original accident in 1995. I was planning on being down for the count for a few weeks, but I was bed bound for nearly 2.5 months and out of work for nearly three months. The number of times I left the house, nay went downstairs, during July and August can be counted on one hand, with some left over. My recovery has been so slow¹ they have installed a wound vac, which I wear 24/7 and I have to charge up nightly.

While I was eating my dinner tonight of rather bland canned soup, I was flipping through several back issues of The Writer and Writer’s Digest. As I read quips, advice, and interviews, the one thing that kept popping up in my brain was the idea of need vs want in genre writing. I want to write thought provoking but not necessarily heavy stories while I need to write the dark and spooky stuff to work out all of my monsters. I mused that when constructing characters, I try so desperately to keep bits of me out of them, the darker bits, for reasons only known to my subconscious self. My heart tells me I’m not ready to go down that road right now, that writing the fluffier pieces will help get me off the ground. The fluffier pieces may be good, but the darker pieces is what will create my mythos.
I’m keeping those monsters at bay, until the time when I can properly pull them out slowly, one by one, into the daylight to acclimate them to this outer world. Then perhaps they won’t seem so scary.
ttfn,
Lisa

1. The first question I hear is, “Are you diabetic?” so I’ll just cut you off at the chase and tell you that no, I’m not diabetic. Yes, I do get checked on a regular basis. No, I do not have poor circulation. No, I am not a smoker and have not been one for a very long time. No, they do not know why it is taking me so long to heal. Yes, I’m getting checked by the doctors on a bi-monthly basis.