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I’m still working at the first of two scenes I need to finish for Bullet. I’ve done seven pages, but it’s still just set up. I’m now at the meat of the scene and I don’t want to do it. Three days off between the last big push and now just don’t seem to be enough to refresh me and my muse. We’re still tired. Dusk falls around me as I try to write, and I feel punished.

Trinity was looking forward to some mother/daughter time, and so was I. She went with Grandma and Grandpa to see the movie, “The Lightning Thief,” and I felt punished because I couldn’t go. A couple of people urged me to go anyway, but I knew that tomorrow when I get up I’d rather have this scene done than have seen any movie. To wake up with this scene still hanging over me would indeed be self-punishing behavior. I’m about fifteen minutes out from dinner being ready and then Carri and I are going for the gym. This book deadline has eaten my gym schedule. At first we just cut it a little short so we could get me back to my desk sooner. Then we started missing days all together. But after a month of cutting the workout short we’re able to tell that we have not been working out. My mood is worse, and every injury I have aches more. I am also gaining serious inches in places I don’t want to gain them. I’m at a weight that when I work out is fine, but without working out the weight spreads itself differently and my jeans and I are no longer comfortable as friends. I still fit in everything, but if I don’t do something soon that will change. So must do gym tonight, but . . . must finish scene. For a month and two weeks I’ve chosen the scene, the book, over the gym or much of anything else, but I can’t keep doing that. That kind of thinking is how I gained the fifty pounds I had to lose a few years back. My deadlines are going to suck, but I can’t let them suck my life, my health, and my sanity.

I am going to do something girlie with my daughter this weekend. I am going to the shooting range with Jon this week. I am going to have lunch with girlfriends next week. I finished reading the true crime book, and now I have a new novel by the couch waiting for me to read it. I am going to start reading the piles and piles of to-be-read books that I keep never getting to. I am going to stay with the exercise and keep feeling better. If my deadlines are not going to get better, then I must reclaim my life and still make the deadlines. Am I the only one who hears the theme from “Mission Impossible”, or is it the theme from “Jaws”?