In Which I Cave In

I hate making major purchases. Hate it. I cried the day we bought our Subaru, and the negotiations for buying that TV were extensive (spread out over several months, but in the end I got built-in bookshelves in trade. Plus it helps that Quin's bonus check was enough to cover the TV he wanted and the new fridge that I was pushing for. Our electric bill has taken a noticeable drop since we got the new fridge, confirming my suspicion that the other one only looked like it was shut most of the time).

Not that I'm particularly frugal; my book spending borders on the out of control. But that's just ten or twenty dollars at a time. Spending hundreds of dollars all at once... I guess I'm always paranoid that some major disaster will befall us and I'll desperately wish I'd held onto that money. Or something. This isn't rational, I know.

All of this is just to say that I made another big purchase today, and the very worst kind, the kind that is something just for me and not the family. I bought myself a laptop. It's a refurbished Dell with no bells or whistles of any kind, as cheap as I could go and still get tech support (which is why I didn't pick anything up on eBay, although I could've gone cheaper there). I haven't actually gotten it yet; perhaps when it's here I'll be all excited and not low-level nauseous that I just dropped a load of cash all at once. I've been debating buying one for more than a year now. The last week's worth of writing time spent copy-typing from notebooks kind of clinched it for me. I think it would behoove me to find a more efficient way of doing this. Now I'm very fond of writing longhand, I'm not sure if I can be creative the same way with a keyboard (and that worry is fueling the nausea, I'm sure), but now that the homeschooling is taking more time than before, my writing time is feeling the pinch. So I pooled my quarterly bonus and some of my overtime money and took the plunge.

*sigh*

At any rate, I have four chapters left to go on the WIP plus some things I need to go back and add in earlier chapters. I've had this problem with integrating the two parts of the story, and there needs to be more conflict and foreshadowing earlier on. After much stewing I think I know what I need to do now. I'm on track for my July 6 deadline, then I'll let this whole thing sit for Harry Potter Month before giving it one last hard edit and then it's off on the query-go-round.

I've never submitted to agents before. I think that nausea just slid up a notch...