Monday, January 25, 2010

The Morning After

It's too early for morning.

If you read the previous post (and if you didn't, then you should) then you know that last night I was waiting on the Amazon Breakthrough Novel of the Year Award contest to open for entries. Apparently I was one of thousands who had the same idea of entering at midnight. In my head I had dreams of being the only one who stayed up late to enter and I'd be able to fill out the form, upload my manuscript and be off to sleep inside of five minutes.

Well, I'd forgotten about people in other time zones who would still be up and waiting with the luxury of an hour or two to go before they had to go to bed. Or the other people like me who are pinning their dreams on this contest.

We all combined to overload the site. It took nearly an hour of constantly hitting the refresh key before I could get to the entry screen. I had to reload the entry screen three times so that it loaded properly and would allow me to upload anything. When I finally reached the point where I was happily entered, had a confirmation number in my e-mail and could shut my computer down and drift off to sleep, I was way too keyed up to get any sleep. So I wasted probably another hour of my precious slumber laying awake listening to the humidifier drowning out sound of the rain.

Needless to say, 6:45 a.m. came much too early this morning. And while I may spend my off hours in pursuit of creating the Great American Novel my working hours are spent doing math. More specifically, I'm continuing to "put math", as we call it, on these construction plans so the field crew can go out and do their jobs. Staring at complicated construction plans on about five hours sleep isn't how I prefer to spend my Monday mornings.

Still, life's pretty good. I have food in my refrigerator, a sandwich in my lunchbox, a novel with a legitimate shot at a contract and a job that pays the bills until the writing does. I really shouldn't complain. I should be happier than a bird with a french fry.

But even the birds know that McDonalds doesn't serve french fries until 11 a.m.

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