The In-Between

Ask me to do anything, just don't ask me to wait

Dear Writer,

Welcome to 2024! I hope your flight was smooth, although I suspect it was not, because if you’re reading this you are probably on Planet Earth where nothing at the moment is smooth so allow me to rephrase: I hope your seatbelt was/is adequate, and that there are little joys tucked away in your metaphorical jacket pockets to find later like that spare bill that used to pop up from time to time.

(That’s what I miss most about using cash; the random occasional twenty that I would leave in a seasonal jacket which I would find again the following season. It just always felt like the Universe is saying, “Great job! Here’s your tip! Mallomars are on me!”)

Anyway, remember how in October I planned that whole trip to New York where I was gonna write but didn’t write anything because I was stuck in that in-between space, the point in the book where I am between acts and have not yet fully downloaded from my Creative Source what exactly happens next?

And remember how I put Dear Writer on hiatus for December because I was going to finish the book in December?

Are you psychic? Can you predict what happened next?

If you put your money on “Lani got to the end of Act 2 which is very close to the end, and then hit the In-Between and came to a very frustrating full stop,” then you win!

I super incredibly with a passion hate the In-Between. I am the kind of person who is really into the Just Fucking Do It part of writing, where I sit down every day and I write and I stare out windows for the rest of the day and only notice that someone is speaking to me about fifteen minutes after we have spoken and then I think, Huh, I hope that conversation wasn’t very important because I remember none of it.

In the In-Between, I wake up every day wanting to write, and some days I do, but none of what I write is actually going to end up in the book because the Creative Download hasn’t completed yet and I should just wait but I hate waiting and there is a mean, bitchy little voice in my head that pokes me and says, You’re not writing because you’re lazy, and instead of saying to that voice, Good God woman, who hurt you? I end up explaining that my Creative Download System is apparently still on a dial-up network, which sounds like excuses, and the lazy comment gets under my skin so I sit down and write five thousand words that I will later throw away anyway BECAUSE DOWNLOAD YOU BITCH AND WHO HURT YOU?

So, in lieu of going around that particular mulberry bush for the thousandth time, I spent December making sugar cookies and decorating them with my kid and my husband, and they were really cute and you know what I didn’t do?

I didn’t take any pictures of them, except this one...

…which is a picture of the dough that I put in the fridge and I don’t remember why I took this picture except maybe to text to Ian?

There was a context.

Fuck if I remember what it was.

Oh, and I took this one, of the box full of cookies that I left on our friend’s porch. I took this picture because I didn’t want them to be weirded out about a random box of homemade holiday cookies on their porch, because we live in an era where the first thought at this sight would be, “Who is trying to poison us?” instead of, “Oh, someone loves us!”

Because the end times has us believing the wrong one of those options is actually more likely.

While Ian was helping me decorate, we thought it would be a fun game to make our friends guess which cookies I decorated and which cookies Ian decorated, which seems like a mean game now, but at the time, we were both laughing about it, so I guess it was okay.

Anyway, here are the only pictures I have of the cookies I spent days and days making, and this was sent to us by one of the recipients, who was playing the game and correctly deduced which cookie Ian decorated.

During that cookie decorating session, as I was painstakingly trying to do all my cookies the exact way the seasoned pro did it in the videos, Ian asked me if perhaps I might be a perfectionist and I said, “I just want to do it right,” and then I heard myself and conceded the point.

Once the cookies were done and distributed and eaten and the holiday was over I downloaded audiobooks about childhood trauma and people pleasing and 2024 looks to be a New Year For the New Me which is a tradition that needs to be bludgeoned with something very heavy and left in the woods to rot (wow, that got violent) but this is just me killing time in the In-Between until this download finally happens, at which point you will know what has happened when Monday comes and goes and I didn’t write a Dear Writer because I forgot a Monday happened.

I literally cannot wait.

Everything,

L