My rain disappeared. :( It is supposed to be back in the morning, but we’ll see about that.

But today was a pretty decent day, all things considered. I got up and took Leo to doggie daycare. Ever since I’ve been feeling better, I’ve been taking him to doggie daycare every day for at least a half-day, because it’s hard in a Seattle winter to give your dog the exercise he deserves. It’s just too cold and rainy and gross to go to the dog park with any regularity, and when I was sick he never got to go outside for more than a couple minutes at a time. So now it’s daycare every day. He gets to spend the day playing with his friends and I get to watch him on the webcam. I was talking to my best friend, explaining to her that I call the daycare to complain when my dog is not in the camera’s field of vision, and she almost peed herself laughing. She was like, “You are going to be such a nightmare when you have human children.” Indeed. I CANNOT WAIT.

I made it into the office for a little while, which is always exciting, but it was super fun today because my friend Lacy, who runs the RealNetworks corporate blog, is doing a cute promo thing for our new RealPlayer where she had RealPlayer fans submit videos of themselves saying “I’m a RealPlayer,” and she’s going to compile it all into one montage. She got a bunch of hilarious videos, but she also wanted to get some footage around the office to intersperse with the fan vids. She and our other coworker Oona stopped by my office, and we tried a bunch of really wacky ideas out. I’m pretty sure we eventually settled on using a clip of me head-banging. I can’t wait for you guys to see it, it’s pretty hilarious. Then we grabbed Chelsia and she did about the funniest gangsta chin-jut I’ve ever seen while exclaiming that she was a RealPlayer.

I also had a fantastic conversation with my boss, who somehow understands me better than damn near anyone else in my life. He’s been like that since almost the first time I talked to him. He just kind of saw through me, and he’s so brilliant at pointing things out to me that I didn’t even notice about myself. I get frustrated with him a lot, and I throw hissy fits at him semi-regularly — it’s a goddamn miracle I haven’t been fired yet — but that’s probably just because he’s always right, and he’s my favorite sounding board in the world.

I’m just having a really hard time writing this novel. I haven’t written fiction in a long-ass time — I was a different person the last time I wrote fiction, just an operationally different human being — and it’s very hard to get back into it. There’s a lot of fear. I realized a while back that I can’t write a non-fiction book; I am in no way emotionally ready. Not even close. Perhaps I never will be. I’ve started a non-fiction book about 100 times and after writing a chapter or two I always wind up a sobbing, hysterical mess of a thing, and I’m like, “Sasha, this is not worth it.” Which is true, and I respect that. It’s one thing to come on here and talk about my day, but it’s another entirely to backtrack through my life and relive how and why I am who I am today. There’s a lot of strength in that story, but there’s also a lot of hurt, and I’m just not equipped to revisit it honestly right now.

But I think that a lot of the message I want to carry can be told via fiction, and so I’m really excited about doing NaNoWriMo, and I’m 15,000 words in so far. I don’t have the emotional break-downs I had trying to write non-fiction. It’s quite the opposite: I cannot get emotionally invested in the book or in the characters. I’m not writing from the heart; I’m writing as an outside observer, so it’s dry and boring and it’s cheesy. There is so much fear in my way. I can’t get through the fear to hear my voice. And that’s always been what makes my writing strong — not the incredible plotlines I devise, but the voice. Without that, any fiction I write is utterly mediocre at best. Maybe I just have to finish the book — so that the fear of creating the plot is gone — and then I can go back and write in the good parts? That doesn’t seem reasonable, either. But finishing this stupid book is a goal I set for myself, and I’m really big on achieving goals when you set them, so I’m praying for God to please remove the fear so that the rest of this process does not have to be as painful as the start of it has been. I have to trust that God is guiding this process. I know I have it in me to do this. I just have to start talking about it, and start approaching the problem from different angles, and — sigh — writing about writing, which I fucking hate. But anyway. Today I started talking about it with my boss, and it made me feel a little better, like I had a little more insight into it. Which is why I’m now blogging about it, and why I’ll be talking about it a lot more.

And suggestions about the writing process are welcome in the comments. :)