Sometimes when I don't have a lot of performances or workshops in a week, I forget what I'm supposed to be doing. I forget what projects are coming up, I forget the things I've been putting off, I forget to look at that big list of things I'm working on I made a few months ago. I've been self-employed since 1993, so you'd think I'd have the hang of it by now. It looks like it from the outside. People compliment me on my self-discipline, and yet, here I am, wondering what to do.

I pick up projects in my mind, turn them over in my hand like pebbles at the beach, look them over carefully, and put them back down.

I could work on "Blood, Guts and Fat Naked Ladies: The Bulgarian Cycle" in case I get to tell it at the Fringe Festival at the National Storytelling Conference (I'm #3 on the waiting list). Nah, I'm not ready.

I could start work on the puppet show of Rapunzel. I need to add a little piece to the stage, so I should go to the hardware store to play tinkertoys with the PVC pipes and fittings. Too much trouble. I need to make a couple of puppets, but the floor of my office is littered with workshop stuff for next week. It will be easier to do the puppets when that stuff is out of the way.

I could work on the stalled novel I wrote in National Novel Writing Month a year and a half ago. I wish I'd read Self-Editing for Fiction Writers before I began writing. Too daunting.

I could go out and work in the yard or the garden on this sunny day. I could look for new stories to tell in the pile of books by my desk. I could make a list of other blog topics. I could go for a walk on the levee. I could pot up that Swedish ivy on the kitchen counter. I could watch the rest of the Bill Moyers/Joseph Campbell Power of Myth DVD that I began last night (I never saw this when it first came out).

Ah, never mind. I think I'll go shopping with my sister. I can always do some work tomorrow.