Work, Ford Madox Brown
12,510. A glorious summer day! Six a.m., sun’s up and shining with a vengeance, striking through the bathroom window, turning the plants neon-green. The weekend was hot and hot, well into the evening. By darkfall it turned cool and balmy, and I stepped outside to feel the breeze. Despite the soothing cool, the air still held a slap of humidity; the day’s sweaty palm not yet lifted.
Saturday I started a new fantasy short story, clumsily titled Nyrabet and the Swordswoman. That’ll do for now, and I’ve got just over 800 words on it so far. Sunday was meant for writing too, but dust-laden household mundanities whined and screeched for my attention. Most of Sunday morning I spent reassembling my bed. In trying to make room for a couple new pieces, I inched it the wrong way and disjointed it. I’d bought it unfinished at Ikea years ago, stained the pine olive-gold, and put it together myself. It worked just fine all these years until I decided to move it, forgetting that it was held together with pegs and cross-screws. So I spent all of last week sleeping on the floor, and the cats wondered what the hell had happened to the bed. Sunday morning I took it completely apart and reassembled it, and the cats are happy now. Me too. After the bed, I had to tend to the dust and jumble before moss and tendrils made an appearance, and Sunday passed in a scramble of housework and cooking this week’s lunches–seasoned salmon and more chicken breasts. Made a pitcher of sweet lemonade with my last 3 lemons and a big pitcher of iced coffee–that was delicious! Um, I had a glass of the iced coffee, not the whole pitcher–but I could have!
Getting up to the budding heat this morning was difficult, and I didn’t think I’d get any work done on Trail of Shadows, but I schlepped to the Mac, turned it on, made coffee, and sat down. Sometimes the words rush through my mind a hurly-burly crowd casting shadows and waving serifs. Then they hit the wall of resistance Pressfield speaks of in The War of Art and crash to the ground in a heap. I must pick them up one by one, shake them free of sticky webbing, and set them on the page with as little lopsidedness as possible. Nothing too crooked this morning, and to think, I was going to tell the Mac to talk to the hand.
