Life has been overwhelmingly fantastic…with an emphasis on the overwhelming. I don’t think this happens to other people, but when too much intense stuff happens (even if it is good stuff!) I tend to snap. Other people weather through depressed days because too much is going wrong in their life…whereas I can spend three days in bed trying not to be a pocketful of grief simply because of some instinctive urge to balance out all the insane happiness.

I feel bad because the week before I was sick, and it’s just been one thing after another keeping me away from my work and my writing. The constant traveling doesn’t help. I’ve been running all over the west coast for far too long without a breather…no time to sit down, get comfortable in a routine, and just write. I had a decent stretch in April, but even The Immaculate Memory of Megan Reed was written in two different states. Let’s just take a look at my living arrangements for the past while, shall we?

April and May 2014 I spent three weeks at Stanford and the other five in Napa, Santa Rosa, Corvallis, and Portland. June I was in Seattle, and then July and August I spent at an apartment with Zaq in Palo Alto where we did one weekend trip to Napa. September I went back to Seattle, and then to San Francisco. By October I was at Stanford, and I stayed there (excepting a week up to Santa Rosa) until I went home for Thanksgiving in November, flew back down for little more than a week, and then flew up to Seattle again for Christmas break. In January of this year I flew back down and stayed put until mid-Februrary when I went up to San Francisco for the SF Writer’s Conference, came home to Stanford for a week, and then packed my bags and drove up to Seattle where I stayed for about a month before going to Portland for the Press Publish Conference.

I returned to Seattle at the start of April, but come May I was on the road and headed down to Stanford again to see everyone before/for graduation…that was interrupted by a friend’s suicide crisis, which I then went home to Seattle for. A few weeks of recovery and another trip to Portland later, I drove back down and stayed in Milpitas for a week. On my way back north, I stayed in Portland before getting to Seattle. I housesat for a friend three weeks in July, then decided I needed a little stability and moved to Portland, where I was going to sublet a room for a WHOLE MONTH AND A HALF. This was interrupted by two week+ long trips to California. When my lease ran up, I went to Seattle and stayed there for three weeks before catching a plane down to San Jose, where I have been for almost four days now. I’m leaving today for Reno, and when I return next week I will spend a week in San Jose before heading to Santa Rosa and then Napa before I head to Seattle for Thanksgiving again.

So while I apologize that my online presence has been spotty, I hope you will bear with me as I try to figure out how to rework my life. I love traveling and bouncing around, but it is becoming abundantly clear that I also need downtime, chill time, and stable time to occasionally give me a breather and keep me sane. I don’t know how to “turn off” the insanity, and everyone tells me that’s part of being twenty-two…but still, I know a lot of twenty-two year-olds who have, like, JOBS for a WAGE and HOMES they RENT even if it’s just on a month-to-month basis. I guess I’ll figure it out eventually.