The Awakening of Adonis, John William Waterhouse
I meant to write this post yesterday about how my Sunday went, but forgot when I started typing.
Sunday–ever have a day when you start out to do one little thing–like clean a bookshelf and the next thing you know you’re at Ikea looking to buy a whole new book cabinet? You decide to clean out a room and before long you’re redecorating the entire house? You’re going to do one load of laundry and suddenly you’re shopping for a whole new wardrobe? Okay, you know what I mean!
Sunday I put up the Christmas tree, draped the pine and berry wreath over the book cabinets, set up my Christmas village–that was supposed to be it. I had it in mind to flop on the couch and read a new book on the history of the Freemasons for the rest of the afternoon. Didn’t happen. In the midst of doing my holiday decorating, I ended up rolling up the living room rug, wrestling it down to storage, and wrestling it into the storage cabinet, which is not at floor level. I felt like the little bitty ant trying to get the humongous leaf back to the nest. Before I could get the darned unwieldy thing into the cabinet, I had to take out every box full of books and the smaller rug that was already in there and some long curtain rods and left over pieces of wood flooring, and book shelves from a disassembled unit. It took quite a bit of doing; I was trying not to hurt myself. Sure could have used somebody with muscles!
While I doing all of that, I also did four loads of laundry. Buying new undies every week gets expensive. I took the book shelves upstairs to my bedroom, and unloaded about a dozen wood boxes–the kind expensive wine comes in–of books and moved it all aside so I could set up the shelves. None of this was on the agenda. All I wanted to do was put up the Christmas tree. By nightfall, I was dog-tired. At 7:30, I settled in bed with the Freemason book, and fell asleep somewhere between the lines in Chapter 2.
Last night, sitting in bed eating my dinner–a roasted Cornish game hen–from the corner of my eye I caught a furry gray paw tentatively trying to steal a piece of chicken. Levi. Loves chicken. I had to laugh, and of course I shared. Between the two of us we demolished the game hen. Taffy is not nearly the beggar Levi is.
This morning during my Starbucks session I let go of another cherished plot idea from ALoS. The more I re-think the story, the more it changes. But it’s all good. I’ve given Ferrant quite a good set of conflicts, and I got a fix on how I’d like to approach the narrative.
