Tag: The Stranger Inside

Big Love

Wednesday! How’s it going, Constant Reader?

I slept well again last night, and I am beginning to think that maybe–just maybe–nightly insomnia has become a thing of the past for me. It’s so nice to not be tired every day, or dragging when I get out of bed, or having to take several hours to fully wake up and participate in the day with my full mind. Huzzah! Today is also my short day at the office (one of them, at any rate) and so tonight I am going to make my mac-n-cheese again, even though it will make a mess (I promised Paul I’d make him some last week when I made it for the potluck) and so I am destined to come home to make a mess to clean up, but when I got home from work last night I did some other cleaning and picking up around the house, rather than just sitting in my easy chair and doing nothing. I do have a load of laundry to fold, another to put in the dryer, and I need to empty the dishwasher; but I have plenty of time this morning before I head into the office.

I also didn’t write last night–I was sleepy when I got home, which is why I did chores–and even fell asleep in my easy chair sometime between nine and ten, waking up around quarter to eleven with a start. I do tend to sometimes, when really tired, doze off in my chair for a moment or two, but never for as long as I did last night. So whatever I’m doing in my life regarding sleep is working.

I did realize last night that a short story I am working on for an anthology submission–one I’ve been working on for several years, off and on, now–has the wrong title. This title is its second; the first title was good, but I had to change it because I decided to use that title for another story it fit better. As I was sitting in my chair last night, my mind drifting away to sleep, my mind zeroed in for some reason on this story–which is currently back-burnered, but despite that it’s still in my head, so it’ll pop out from time to time–and as I was reimagining the opening scene–which is set in a grocery store; the entire story takes place during the main character’s trip to the grocery store–it hit me squarely between the eyes: the title doesn’t fit. And when I don’t have the right title….the work doesn’t ever seem right. (Case in point: the current work-in-progress, Bury Me in Shadows, didn’t really start flowing until I changed the original title, Bury Me in Satin..and while no, I didn’t work on it at all yesterday, I feel really good about this final revision. The stuff I’ve done on the first chapter is solid, and I couldn’t be more pleased.)

I was also too tried to do any more reading last night, so I think after the mac-n-cheese goes into the oven, and once I have that mess cleaned up, I may curl up with Laura Benedict’s The Stranger Inside.

Or I might write. I’m feeling a lot better after my vacation about a lot of things, not the least of which is my writing these days. And while I may have only put about 1500 words of revision into effect with the book, those are  great words, and they are completely reshaping the story and turning it into what I’d envisioned it would be from the very beginning. I don’t know what on earth was the problem before–why I was having so much issue connecting with the stories and the characters–but I do feel them now; there’s a lot of family dysfunction that I was simply glossing over, and I always had an issue with contrivance with the story; it was necessary for my main character to spend the summer in Alabama, but getting him there felt completely contrived, and the way I was writing it and telling the story, it simply didn’t make sense for his mother to send him there–and the more I got into the actual story as it developed, the less sense it made; to quote Joan Didion, “the center would not hold.”

And when the center doesn’t hold, the entire cake will collapse.

Hence the stress, anxiety and borderline depression I’ve been suffering through the entire time I’ve been writing this book.

Ah, self-diagnosis.

And on that note, back to the spice mines with me. Have a lovely day, everyone.

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Point of No Return

So, what did we learn from our first Monday back at work? One, that it’s very important to get physical and mental rest from the day in, day out of full time employment, and that if I can stay focused and motivated…well, there’s really nothing I can’t do if I want to do it.

But that has always been true. It has always astounded me how much I can do–and what I can do–if I put my mind to it and ignore those horrible voice in my head (depending on what it is, they alternate between my parents, really–every so often a former teacher will pop into my head, working on my confidence and trying to paralyze me into useless futility). All that stuff I’d been dreading, and putting off? Handled yesterday with aplomb, minimal irritation or embarrassment, and now completely out of the way.

What have we learned from this? Probably nothing.

Last night, for the first time in over a month–since I was sick at Halloween, actually–I sat down, opened the latest version of Chapter One, and started revising. And while it wasn’t as easy as I would like–I deleted about a thousand words and added a thousand new ones, that make better sense and work better; certainly the voice of my main character is better defined and sounds more realistic–I still managed to get some work done, and it was good work. Very good work, with which I am very pleased. I was truly worried, frankly, that this book was never going to get kicked into gear; now it has, and now it’s possible that I might–just might–get this book finished this month and ready to do something with in January.

What a glorious feeling.

I slept really well again last night–going to bed earlier on the nights before these early mornings really does make all the difference–and since Paul was out to dinner with some friends, I came home and cleaned the kitchen, preparatory to getting some writing done, and so this morning my kitchen is pretty clean–there’s still a load of laundry in the dryer that needs to be folded, but I doubt I’ll get to that this morning–and so I am pretty pleased with that as well. I am pretty certain I’ll start feeling run down and tired by the end of the week again, but as long as I keep getting good sleep at night, I should be okay.

Or so I hope, at any rate.

It’s hard to believe it’s December already. Where did this year go? Football season can’t be almost over already, can it? Heavy heaving sigh. I was just thinking yesterday that the next few months are going to be nothing but madness, sheer madness. There’s Christmas, then New Year’s; and then of course it’s Twelfth Night and Carnival has started. There’s college football bowl games and play-offs; the Saints will be in the play-offs as well, and then after the parades are all over, at the end of March is the Williams Festival. Heavy heaving sigh. I am also heading up to New York in the middle of January; it’s been years, and that should be a lot of fun–exhausting, but fun.

And 2020! A sparkling new decade, exciting and new. That will be the decade I hit sixty at long last, and should I live that long, the decade where I finally am able to retire from the day job. Sooner would be better than later, of course; I am considering my options for going early–but that would also mean paying off most of my debt and the car. I think the car will be finished being paid off towards the end of next year or early 2021; I am on track to get it paid for in less than the five years of the loan, and who knows? I may, if there’s a windfall of some sort, even be able to get it paid for even sooner. And if I can make that Honda last twenty years–which I should be able to–I hopefully won’t ever have to buy another car before I die.

And on that cheery note, tis time to get back to the mines of spice. I want to get some more reading of Laura Benedict’s book, The Stranger Inside, done today, and obviously, it would be amazing to get more progress done on the book.

But I’m writing again, am excited about the book (as it goes into yet another draft), and feeling pretty good. Yay, Gregalicious!

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