I’m not a huge fan of vacations. They’re just not my style. First of all, I find all the planning and spending money to be a bit stressful. I also don’t like the alienation of travel. I really try to limit all trips. Even conventions, while fun, aren’t a high priority for me. Even more, I’m not sure that I buy into the vacation concept. I guess there are two theories of vacationing. The first is that you live life at a higher intensity for a few weeks and accumulate some memories that you can hold close even when you’re stuck with the day-to-day. The second is that you relax and accumulate some ease-of-mind that you’ll eventually fall back upon when life gets too difficult.

Neither one has ever sat well with me. When I’m on one of those higher-intensity vacations, I always feel a melancholy. It makes me so aware of the fact that all things are transient. And when I’m on a relaxation-vacation, I feel like as though all of this well-being is going to disintegrate the moment I return to ordinary life.

Anyway, this is just a long way of saying that I’ve done absolutely nothing for the last two days except watch The West Wing and play this roguelike game, Sunless Seas, that my friend Chris recommended on his blog. And it’s been not-unfun, I suppose.

This is the time I’d allotted to trying to work on my next novel-for-adults. I have a vague concept in mind for it, but nothing has quite gelled. I don’t know. I feel like a bit of a slacker. I haven’t completed a major project since writing the first draft of my MG novel back in June. I feel as though I’m in a bit of a rebuilding period in terms of my work, but I’d really like to stop rebuilding and start building. That, to me, is the real vacation. I love that feeling of really understanding a project and flying through it. I never feel so confident and excited and at-ease as I do when I’m halfway through writing a novel. It’s all the excitement of the wildest vacation you can imagine, and it doesn’t cost a cent.