If it's Tuesday it must be Ripley's Aquarium
March Break madness, deadlines, and defeating the gremlins that want to thwart us.
It’s March Break y’all, and even though my kid isn’t in school, everyone else’s kids are, which means all our “extra-curriculars” (in quotation marks because there is truly no curriculum here) are cancelled, and all the friends are in day camps, and we were braced for a week of scrambling for ways to fill our time.
Luckily, my sister-in-law and niece decided to come to town for a visit, and the kid is over the moon about spending several days with his beloved cousin, so we’re soaking up everything Toronto has to offer and seeing it through visitors’ fresh, enthusiastic eyes. We’re doing the Aquarium, the ROM, the Science Centre, Kensington Market, Chinatown, the Beaches, and so much more. Who has time for a proper Substack in the midst of all this? It was only Tuesday1 as I started to write this, and I’d already lost track of our ambitious schedule.
Just a week ago, I was sitting at the worktable in the shed in our back yard, the space heater whirring at my feet, when I started feeling hopeless about the massive project we were trying to whip into shape for a major deadline. Colin had been giving me every possible opportunity to work on it, because my half of the combined skillset that forms Ultra 8 Pictures is more oriented toward things like writing grant applications and pitch deck copy, assembling budgets, and translating art-talk into business-talk.
I was overwhelmed, feeling very self-blamey for not starting the work sooner, even though there were extenuating circumstances that prevented this, and even though I wasn’t working in isolation - many elements of the larger, unwieldy whole were in the hands of others, entirely out of my control. I looked around at my cosy work nook, surrounded by Colin’s neatly organized shelves of screws, piles of scrap wood, and assorted large and small power tools, and asked myself what the hell I was hoping to accomplish with this stressed-out, half-assed effort. Then I remembered my optimism project, and asked a different question.
What if it all worked out?
And so, I soldiered on. By the time we hit send on the big email at ten minutes to deadline o’clock on Friday, I was almost too burned out to enjoy a triumphant glass of bubbly that we promised ourselves we’d have when the thing was done. But, we toasted to a job well done anyway, and I tried not to inwardly criticize it for not being a job perfectly done.
Yesterday, in a swirling tornado of sightseeing and bubble tea, I found out that our submission was successful. It’s too early to reveal any public details yet, but … it did work out. My “what if” wasn’t just a futile exercise in half-hearted positivity. It turned out to be the real outcome. A real blow to the worst-case-scenario gremlin who lives somewhere behind my left eyeball. Let’s call him Fred.
To add insult to injury (to the gremlin, not to the breezy, newly-minted Pollyanna who writes this), I also got some feedback from the mentor/editor who is helping me with my novel. I was worried that the most recent chapters I sent him weren’t working, but his notes started with these words:
Dear Katarina,
I had a great time reading this. I am particularly impressed by the emotional strands among all the characters, and how they interplay so well.
In your face, Fred!
The title of this week’s Substack is a riff on the film If It’s Tuesday, It Must Be Belgium, a 1969 rom-com starring Ian McShane and Suzanne Pleshette. The whole thing seems to be up on YouTube, if you’re looking for a pleasant diversion.