A chilly spring morning, the mercury sitting at nine
degrees with clouds and showers expected later today. Right now, it’s sunny …
and I’m dawdling.
Ter dropped me in the village and I treated myself to
a “real” Asian Mist—all milk despite my recent dairy-free status, a risk I’m
willing to take with three days of vacation left. I can afford a flare if
that’s my fate.
Re-work on the novel has been slow, due in part to my
dawdling but mostly because I’m rewriting more than I’d imagined I would. And
it’s daunting. So I let myself be distracted by F***book and Youtube (lots of
Lep stuff there!) to the detriment of the project, and every day I become
increasingly anxious that I’ll get nothing accomplished before heading back to
the mill.
Well, not nothing. I’ve laundered the bedding
and taken long walks. I’ve learned (happily) that Rick Savage is partial to
Maseratis—my kind of man—and Joe Elliott likes a 4x4 because there’s loads of
room in one. I’m brewing more kombucha and will have another batch of
pfefferneuse in the freezer before Friday. Most importantly, I’ve learned how
to answer my phone. But where actual writing is concerned, there’s not much to
show for my working holiday.
So I’m going dark for a couple of days, to focus on
the re-write and get some momentum going. I want to wake up thinking about the
story instead of what witty remark I can post on F***book. I get than an author
should be interactive with her audience, but she’s only an author if she’s
writing offline and I’ll kick myself if this week passes without some
significant progress on the novel. Part of me thinks I should blow it up and
start from scratch, but three hundred pages in and I’m reluctant to dump any of
it. Much of it is good. I’ve loaded the files into a separate folder and am
rebuilding one chapter at a time, but the deeper I go, the more detours are
taken from the original draft, so who knows? Maybe a complete bust up is the
best thing!
Won’t know unless I quit dawdling and get down to it.
Apricot tea and Sarah Brightman are in place and ready to go. Time for Ru to
get disciplined.
*sigh*
Rainy day here. Slow work day. My ears feel like they are going to explode they are so plugged from my cold, I'm on day 10 now btw. I have daydreamed, snacked, sipped tea and most importantly, in my downtime, I wrote a poem. I want to go home and read it aloud before I post anything but I wrote something today and that's a frackin' miracle.
ReplyDeleteI am going to fill out my Mama's taxes when I arrive home and then put on my artsy fartsy hat. See what happens.
I saw what happened and I loved it, Bean. Man, when you put your mind to it, you make poetic magic.
DeleteSort of like what I can do with prose, when I'm not dawdling ...
That's your greatest gift.
DeleteNo, YOU are my greatest gift. You and Ter, that is :)
Delete