A small jump for joy!

The weight has lifted.  I am complete with Air War College as of yesterday.  I feel lighter and my mood is noticeably better.  But...but..now I have no excuses to stop me from writing.  I need to get back in the writing saddle again, but I've been absent for so long that I have to find the horse and put the saddle on it.  I was so looking forward to this moment, but once it arrived I felt of barely perceptible pang of fear... just enough that I was able to notice it, and it surprised me.

I opened up my manuscript a few days ago when I had finished my last active part in the process (I had to wait for my mentor to approve and send in my self-assessment), and started to muddle through it.  I was on fire when I had last touched it and had made some really big strides in the revision, not only with correcting some syntax and tagging issues, but with a few concepts that I wanted to tweak.  I knew I was on my game, and it was thrilling to understand where I was at and where I needed to go to finish the last big revision. 


I've been analyzing my feelings (always tricky) and I've come to the conclusion that it's rooted in a fear that I've lost some skill in the intervening months.  I'm hoping it's a little like flying.  I can go for weeks without flying and still see no degradation of skills, but if I do that repeatedly, over the course of a year with long breaks between events, I see rust creep in.  I'm hopeful that it will work the same way, in that I can just refresh my writing currency and the rust will get buffed off.  I haven't helped myself by keeping the blog up-to-date either.  I just haven't had anything to blog about, at least nothing compelling.  I also hope that changes.  I am starting to sound like Obama, with all this talk of hope and change.

I'm excited about the future and I will be making a concerted effort to finish this next pass in a timely fashion.  I'm trying to get into a Master's program this fall that will require me to focus on a new writing project, so I really need to have this one wrapped up by fall.

--end.