Busy, busy, busy — BREAK! And brakes…

For the last three weeks, I’ve been busy editing a manuscript. Not one of my own. Something someone else wrote. This was the first editing pass. I wrapped it up and emailed everything to both the author and the publisher Friday night with thirteen minutes to spare before the clock ticked over to Saturday morning.

It took a lot of long days and late nights, weekdays and weekends both, to meet the deadline on this one, and toward the end my body started reminding me that working that kind of breakneck pace for that long isn’t healthy. But I kept myself going with the promise that as long as I got everything done Friday, I’d take the weekend off to relax in the park, reading and writing and maybe even sketching a bit.

Unfortunately, the car started making weird noises while braking as we were heading back to Greensboro from a quick, previously unplanned trip to Kernersville on Friday evening. Brakes are one of those really important things that get my undivided attention when they start acting up on a car, so Chad and I postponed our Saturday picnic to take the car to the shop instead. I figured it would be something simple like new brake pads. Well, I was hoping. Chad had darker, more expensive suspicions, and he was right. Yes, we needed new brake pads — but we also needed new rotors and a new driver’s side bearing, too. So instead of relaxing in a park reading, we spent six hours and $600 at the mechanic. But the car is thirteen years old; at that point you have to start expecting these things. And I did get to finish the book I was reading, and start a new one.

On Sunday, we had a picnic lunch at Fourth of July Park in Kernersville, then went to a little shopping plaza in downtown Kernersville for a few hours to read, then headed back to Greensboro and strolled around the Arboretum for a while. So even though we missed out on the park Saturday, we more than made up for it Sunday.

I’m still a little rundown and under the weather, but I don’t know how long I’ve got until the author sends the revised manuscript back to me for the second editing pass. I want to get as much done on a writing project of my own before that, so now I’m diving back into work, only this time instead of red ink and grammar corrections, I’ll be awash in early twentieth century Russia and creatures of Slavic myth.