Sarah Wynde's Blog, page 66

Playing house

I spent a couple hours this morning moving into Serenity. Like, really moving into Serenity. Tomorrow morning when I want coffee, it’ll be in the van. When I get dressed, I’ll be running out to the driveway first. My cooking capability in my house is down to… well, nothing, actually. My frying pan and two pots are both in the van, along with all my utensils.

Does this make any sense at all? No! I’ve got four more days in my house and Serenity’s not hooked up to water, and the refrigerator’s not cold, so it’s impractical to think I can really just stay in her. But I’ve been having to make tough choices about what I can bring & what I can’t bring and tomorrow is my last trash day, so I needed to make decisions. The easiest way to decide was to try things out.

It was fun, actually. I put all my dishes and pantry goods onto the shelves, then realized that when the bed is made up as a double bed instead of two singles, one of the cabinets will be difficult to access. So I rearranged everything. And then I decided that my shelves didn’t work the way I needed them to, so I did it again. It felt remarkably like playing house, like being a little kid in a pretend kitchen, doing pretend shopping.

Analyzing the way I use my dishes has also been entertaining me. I have two pretty mugs, blue with red flowers, white interiors. I’m very fond of them. But I use them only when I’m having an extra cup of coffee. They’re “special” mugs. On a daily basis, they’re too small and they cool off too quickly. Meanwhile, I have four tall latte mugs, and I use them exclusively for tea. They’re the perfect tea mugs, because they heat so evenly and hold the heat so well. I also have two red mugs that I didn’t actually like very much aesthetically, but they were what I drank regular coffee from, because they were a good size and weight.

Eight mugs. Serenity does not have enough room for eight mugs. Also, I am one person. I do not need eight mugs. For a time, I had six in there — two of each. But even six didn’t fit. So then I had one of the pretty ones, one of the red ones, and two of the latte mugs. The reality, though, is that my perfect tea mugs are by far my favorite and the most useful to me. What to do? Finally I asked myself the daring question: could I actually drink coffee in my tea mugs? It turns out the answer is yes.

But it amused me to realize how rigid I am in my uses of specific things. I put almost all my knives in Serenity for exactly the same sort of reason: I need the small one for apples and other fruit, and the next size up for carrots and vegetables and the third for slicing meat, and the fourth and fifth and sixth… but I suspect that after I’ve lived in Serenity for a while I will discover that I can live with two or three knives. Fortunately they don’t take a lot of room, so I’m going with abundance when it comes to knives for now.

Ugh, and bowls… so many tough decisions when it comes to bowls, because apparently I need a certain bowl for scrambling eggs and another bowl for marinades and a third bowl for mixing salad dressing and a fourth bowl for making rubs. And let’s not forget cereal, fruit, and frozen treats! I could actually explain why each of these bowls is better for its purpose than another but I did manage to decide that I could adjust to having only a couple types of bowls. Well, four. Or five. Anyway, I still have plenty of bowls, but I picked ones that stack and reluctantly let go of the ones that don’t.

Spices and herbs have been fun, too. I think I wound up keeping almost everything except red pepper and pink Himalayan sea salt. Their containers were just too tall or I would have squeezed them in, too. Three kinds of vinegar — balsamic, red wine, and white wine, but I jettisoned all the oils except coconut and olive. I hardly ever used the avocado oil, the red palm oil, the canola oil and the other oils I had, so I can live without them. Soy sauce, yes, fish sauce, no. Four kinds of hot sauce and chili-garlic sauce, yes, but all pre-packaged salad dressing, no.

Tomorrow I take Serenity to the dealer and get her vent fixed. Saturday and Sunday — I finish cleaning the house, I guess. Do a last load of laundry. Swim and swim and swim some more. Spend some time with friends, I hope. And then I’ll be moving on. And getting back to Grace! I find it really very funny today that Serenity has stolen so much of my attention from Grace. Even funnier when I realize that my mental name for APB (which has also stolen attention from Grace) is Balance.

Serenity, Grace, and Balance — three very nice things to have in one’s life.

To-do lists

I had an incredibly productive Monday morning:

I scheduled an appointment at the RV dealer to get Serenity’s vent fixed.

I called the fence people about the permit problem.

I took a load of stuff to Goodwill, probably the last.

I stopped at the pharmacy and picked up a prescription and discussed arrangements for refills on the road.

I called my doctor and got a couple extra refills added to my prescription.

I took some old cans of paint and bug spray to the landfill.

I loaded up Serenity with four bookcases and a chair and drove them to the house of the friend who’s taking them.

I posted a question about traveling with pets to Facebook.

I emailed my realtor.

I called the guy who’s taking my porch furniture and made arrangements with him for Thursday.

I talked to my sister and set up a time for my nephew to come collect a few things.

I spent some time researching temperature monitoring solutions for when I have to leave the dogs in Serenity.*

And then I sat down at the computer to write and… didn’t.

I have this fantasy where I’m so engrossed in the story I’m telling that all the trivial details of my life are simply flotsam and jetsam drifting past unnoticed while a current of pure story drives my days. Reality is never so smooth. If Grace was a kayak outing, it would be an insanely frustrating one where the current of reality keeps driving me into eddies and backwaters. Actually, that’s a really good description of Grace anyway. I keep thinking I’ve got it and then… I keep not getting it.

But the day is not yet over. Admittedly, it’s after 7 and I haven’t had dinner and still need to take the trash out and my realtor just answered my email… but words can still be written! So off I go to at least try, having fulfilled one more item on my checklist of things to be done. (I’ve managed to blog every Monday of 2016 — I didn’t want to break my chain!) A week from today, I’ll be on the road, headed to PA, and all of the vast multitude of house-related to-do list items will be… well, done. I don’t know whether I’m more relieved, scared, or excited.

*The temperature inside Serenity hit 122 degrees the other day. I was impressed. That was with all windows closed and no AC on, of course, on a Florida day in July — a situation in which I would never leave the dogs. But I would like some kind of warning system for when I do leave them, although preferably one that doesn’t cost a small fortune.

Life lessons in Q-tips

Real Q-tips are better than fake Q-tips.

This feels like one of those life lessons that I have to learn every five years or so, but this time around I’m learning a new lesson, too: it is better to throw away the cheap swabs than suffer through using the whole box of them.

I think I might be finally learning this life lesson because I’m getting rid of so much other stuff. It’s ridiculous to walk away from a $400 gas grill but struggle to discard a product that cost less than $2, which I bought in order to save $1. And yet, if it weren’t for the fact that I think these cotton swabs are making Zelda’s life unhappy, I probably would still use the box. Penance for a bad buying decision? Frugality as self-torture? Why choose to suffer? I don’t know, but I know I usually would.

Now, however, I am resolved to throw away the box as soon as I finish writing this post. And then I’m going to go to the store and buy Q-tips, real Q-tips, with plenty of cotton, so that when I’m cleaning my ears, it feels like I’m cleaning them with a cotton ball instead of poking them with a stick. And, more to the point, when I’m cleaning Zelda’s ears, which is how the vast majority of my Q-tips get used, she will feel the same.

Why so many Q-tips for the dog, you ask? Because she loves to swim. Swimming equals water in the ears. Water in the ears equals breeding ground for bacteria. Bacteria equal ear infection. When Bartleby has an ear infection he makes it immediately clear as strongly as he can — he gets grouchy, snappy, hides in corners, resists being touched. If he were a kid, he’d whine loudly and take to his bed the moment his temperature hit 99 degrees. Z, on the other hand, is a stoic. I haven’t realized that she’s had ear infections until she’s done damage to her ears, so I try to be hyper-vigilant about getting water out of them after she’s gone swimming. Of course, in 10 days, she will be swimming a lot less, so maybe I don’t need to worry about this.

But that thought is too big to contemplate. Today, I’m going to focus on Q-tips and shelf liner and triple A batteries instead. A run to the post office to return some products I shouldn’t have bought. A check of the battery in Serenity to make sure it’s charging properly. Writing this evening with my friend J. And if the thought keeps creeping into my head that this is the second-to-last Thursday I will ever spend in the house that I thought I would live in forever… well, that’s okay, too. Because two weeks from today I will be in Pennsylvania, I hope, eating blueberries and counting my blessings.

Change

R came home for the weekend, which was lovely.

We went out for sushi at our favorite sushi place on Friday night. Saturday morning he slept in. For breakfast, I took small slices of some melon halfway between cantaloupe and honeydew and topped them with prosciutto and a sprinkle of ginger. I saved him some so he ate a little of that when he woke up and then we had a big brunch of bacon and eggs*, scrambled with sautéed onion, cilantro and avocado. Plus coffee with coconut milk and cinnamon.

We watched a movie while we ate. Inception, I think, with a break in the middle to swim and read in the sun. Then we ran some errands: another load of stuff to Goodwill and also a run to the storage unit. He went out for a while and when he came home, we watched Ocean’s Eleven, and ate salad with roast beef, sweet corn, radishes, cucumber, avocado, and a dressing of balsamic, olive oil, italian herbs, fresh cilantro, and finely diced red onion. I’m sort of into the diced red onion salad dressing. It’s got a really nice but subtle kick.

On Sunday, he woke up late, then went out to lunch with a friend. When he came home, we watched Interstellar. Afterwards, he helped me drag some stuff out to the curb — his box spring and mattress, an old washing machine that’s been in the garage for the past seven years.

We put Serenity’s name on her. He’d been joking about my spaceship since he first saw her, but when he looked at the name lettering I’d gotten, he told me I’d picked a very Christian font. I was a little taken aback, but he viewed this as a good thing. He said that when I was broken down by the side of the road, people would be inspired to want to help me.

We talked about Ireland and his job, his thoughts for the future, ideas about plays he’s writing and his thesis, places he wants to go, and the movies we were watching. Whether Christopher Nolan can get away with anything. A show he’s watching on Netflix that I would really hate but that makes him laugh. Game of Thrones, which neither of us watch, but both of us know much too much about.

And then he got into his car and drove away. And I will not see him again until 2017. And we will probably never live in the same house again. And I am so sad.

Also completely congested, eyes puffy, face tear-stained, and so, moving on. Change happens. It’s not always easy. This change is enormously better for me than sitting in this house, waiting for him to visit, so I know it’s right. But a little grieving, that’s right, too.

*Cooking note for future reference: I cooked the eggs in red palm oil, which is supposed to be a butter substitute. It worked pretty well. They’re not kidding about the “red” part, though — it turned my onions orange and gave the eggs a deep, rich color. It doesn’t have much taste, which is a positive, I guess. Eggs cooked in olive oil or coconut oil are definitely flavored with the oil. Well, as are eggs cooked in butter. Funnily enough, though, I think I’ve adapted to eggs cooked in coconut oil. They give the eggs a flavor of sweetness that I missed. I’d still prefer butter, though, if only dairy didn’t make my immune system crazy.

Letting go of expectations

The search for happiness begins with letting go of expectations.

I can’t remember where I read that (and I probably mangled it, since I can’t find the link) but I was thinking about it this morning while I was practicing meditating. At first I really thought it was one of those bullshit philosophical sentiments that make absolutely no sense with a closer look. Like, really, one of those “you will only find the thing that you are looking for when you stop looking” ideals that may be occasionally true, but is mostly not helpful. Sure, I’ve had moments when I’ve given up on finding my keys and suddenly remembered where they might be, but most of the time I find my misplaced keys by looking for them. And not looking, while it might eventually work, does not get me out of the house on time.

But while I was meditating and my thoughts were roaming, as they do, I realized time and again that what I was thinking about was an expectation. Example one, things to do. I had a moment of realizing that I still didn’t manage to do a two-minute job for a friend, felt guilty, resolved to do it immediately, or at least as soon as I stopped meditating — and then realized that my plan was an expectation, an expectation for what I would be doing next. So I reminded myself to let it go. (I will still do it, of course, but I let the pressure of needing to do it immediately and the guilt of not having done it yet go.)

Next I started worrying about Serenity. The dealer called yesterday and they couldn’t find anything wrong with the air-conditioner. Not an okay answer. But worrying is just another expectation, an expectation for a future that will be the way I want it to be. There’s nothing I can do to influence either what’s wrong with Serenity or what will happen next, so what value does worry have? It is entirely contrary to my nature to try to let go of that kind of worry, but I did it anyway. I thought of it as an expectation and tried to let it go.

I went back to trying to focus on my breath and still my noisy brain, but my nose was dripping. It’s tough to be peaceful when you have a runny nose. So then I started questioning whether I was sick or allergic and running back over all the things I’ve eaten recently, trying to figure out what I could be reacting to. But that’s another expectation, in its own way. I’m expecting that something I ate might be making me sick. And really, what difference does it make? My runny nose is going to stay the same, regardless of whether it’s caused by a cold virus or injudicious dairy intake. What benefit does deciding that I’m to blame possibly give me?

At that point, I was totally into the idea. Every thought that came up, I looked at and tried to see how it could be labeled an expectation. As soon as I defined the thought as an expectation, I tried to let it go. Unexpectedly, I got happier and happier as I did so, until the bell rang and I finished my meditation on a pleasant glow.

I was talking to a parent friend a few weeks ago who’s struggling with her adolescent daughter. She’d snapped at her daughter, “Do you want to be right or do you want to be happy?” Her daughter’s answer, “Right, of course!” I think wanting to be right is expectation-thinking. I’m not sure I can express it better than that, but for today, I’m going to try living without expectation (to the extent that is even possible for an obsessive, controlling, perfectionist type) and see where it gets me. Because I think at this point in my life, I’m grown up enough to decide that I would rather be happy than right.

More about moving

This morning, while I was sitting out on my lanai, enjoying the early morning breeze (early-ish, it was maybe 7:30), I had a million ideas for blog posts. (Serenity first.

I picked her up last Wednesday, YAY!, and when I wrote my blog post last Thursday, she was sitting in my driveway, feeling something like an overwhelming Christmas present, needing to be unwrapped but almost too scary to touch. So much to learn, so much to do, so much stuff to move in and organize and…

…that all became irrelevant Thursday evening, when in the midst of a torrential rainstorm, I discovered that it was also raining inside Serenity. I am trying to count this as fortunate in so many ways — it happened while I was here, still with a dry bed to sleep in. It happened in a big way. If the weather hadn’t been so extreme, it might have taken me weeks to realize that a few drips were a symptom of a serious problem. It happened before I’d moved much stuff into her, so she could go back to the dealer without inconveniencing me unduly. All good things. Of course, they’re sort of counter-balanced by the rather bad thing of it raining inside my future home, but hey, glass half-full. It could have been so much worse. I would have been very unhappy to learn that she leaked at 3AM when I was sleeping under the leak.

So, yeah, Serenity is back at the dealer and I’m really, really hoping to get her back sometime this week. Obviously, one of the dumb issues that I’m going to have to figure out how to deal with when my home needs repair is that she’s also my vehicle. I need to find a ride to get back to her, a ride to get home when I drop her off. It’s not so convenient.

In other things — my weekend felt bizarrely chaotic and overwhelming. The house is a mess and I’m still needing to get rid of more stuff. I’m definitely at the point where the decisions get harder and harder. I have approximately 50 shirts. This is too many shirts. In so many ways, this is too many shirts! But I’ve already said good-bye to all the ones that I didn’t really like, that didn’t really fit as well as I wanted them to or weren’t as flattering as I thought they’d be. I’ve also gotten rid of all the ones that I loved, but that were showing signs of their age. (Almost all of those, a couple are going to get worn until they’re literal shreds. I have a Lehigh University t-shirt that is probably fifty years old, maybe older, faded, with holes, and I still love it.) So, yeah, hard choices about stuff going on.

Also much trying to plan. The house closes three weeks from today. Where am I going to sleep that night? For that matter, where I am going to sleep the night before that? I will have needed to get the furniture out of the house before closing, because it’s not like I’m sticking it on a truck and moving it to the next place. But Serenity needs power to run the air-conditioner, and the guy who showed me around warned me that house power (i.e., not 30 amp) was not sufficient to run the AC. And in Florida, in July? I need the air-conditioner. I can run it on the generator, but probably shouldn’t all night. So the house closes in three weeks, but I need to be staying elsewhere before then, and elsewhere needs to be close enough that I can conveniently come to the closing. Decisions, decisions.

And yeah, somewhere along the way, I’d really like to get back to writing regularly. I’ve missed too many days in a row, because of the distractions of camper ownership, camper repair, and house chaos. But one day at a time, right?

Today’s goal: well, some words would be nice, but I need to get simpler than that. Email! I don’t know how many emails are stacked up in my inbox right now but far too many of them are real emails that deserved real replies. So today’s goal–clean out my inbox, do some more work on cleaning out my house, and remember to enjoy the moment that I’m in. Also, yoga. It’s been at least three or four days, which is too long to go for something that always makes me feel more settled and joyful.

Happy Fourth of July!

Excitement exhaustion

I haven’t even gone anywhere yet and I’m exhausted. I think it’s excitement exhaustion: it’s not even that I’ve done so much… although come to think of it, I’ve done an incredible amount in the past couple of months. But it’s not even that I’ve done so much in the last few days as it is that I’ve spent them poised to do ALL the stuff and so even though I haven’t yet done ALL the stuff, the tension of waiting to do ALL the stuff has tired me out.

All the stuff: pick up Serenity. Learn how to use her. Figure out what fits in her. Get a storage unit and put some of my belongings in the storage unit. Clean out the rest of the house. Get a Sun Pass transponder. Do some laundry. Get sheets to fit her beds. Figure out what size sheets make the most sense… It feels like I’ve got an overwhelming number of things to do. Realistically, there’s no rush. Tomorrow, the weekend, next week–they’re all just as good as today for getting things done.

Meanwhile, on Tuesday, I was at a meditation meeting, sitting very still, trying to meditate and feeling very itchy. As soon as the meditation was over, I got up and switched seats, thinking maybe I was having an allergic reaction to the fabric of the chair I was sitting in. An hour later, it started to feel like a safe bet that the chair had been infested with some kind of bug. Fleas, maybe?

By last night, it was obvious to me that there was no way it was fleas. I’ve been bitten by fleas before. Annoying little itchy red spots. A pain, but nothing… well, interesting, for lack of a better word. (I’m tempted to use exciting, but that just feels so wrong.)

Anyway, I started researching. What kind of bug bites turn into inflamed red welts, bigger than hives? Ans: bed bugs. I’m now completely paranoid that I brought them back into my house with me. As soon as I got home I showered and threw my clothes into the laundry, but that does not change my paranoia. I am also equally paranoid that since I am one of the lucky people who respond rather dramatically to bed bug bites the welts could actually last as long as three weeks, as the internet tells me they might. I would guess that I have approximately 40 bites on my arms, back and shoulders. They itch and burn and some of them are forming blisters. And yeah, I’m feeling pretty damn sorry for myself.

I also ate some beans yesterday because I am bad at reading menus, and I’m fairly sure my general state of sluggish misery has something to do with that, too.

So, boring whiny blog post… Sorry! And it’s not even what I meant to write about when I opened up the browser. Yesterday I had an IDEA. Or maybe it was Tuesday. But either way, I saw a thing that could happen that would be a better thing than what I’ve been trying to make happen in Grace. It was very exciting. I haven’t actually tried to write it yet, but the day is not yet over.

Anyway, I was talking to my friend Tim about it (when talking is that thing that involves typing in a message window) and I decided to make a new writing rule: the Dany Rule. My Dany rule is, “All the bad stuff in the world can happen to your character, but the story only gets interesting when she starts to burn shit down.” Named, with great fondness, for Daenerys Targaryen, of course, whose clips I watch on youtube, even though I’ve never watched a single episode of Game of Thrones or even read the books. It’s tough to resist a character who is so very good at burning stuff down.

Anyway, Noah is not going to start burning anything down, but he is going to take action, I hope. A desperate action, but one that is going to be far more interesting than his current passive state of letting things happen. And I’m going to take some actions, too — although perhaps not today.

It’s probably not a bomb

I woke up a while back to the sound of ticking. Not a big sound, a little sound. Tick, tick, tick.

My first sleepy thought was, “I should get rid of that clock. I don’t need more things to ruin my sleep.”

My second sleepy thought was, “I don’t have a clock.”

From sleepy to heart-racing in two seconds. My thoughts went like this: there’s a ticking noise. I don’t own a clock. It must be a bomb. There’s a bomb in my bedroom. Someone must have stolen into my room and planted a bomb under my bed. They want to blow me up because… nope. That’s silly. There’s no reason anyone would want to blow me up.

Okay, then it’s not a bomb. It must be a watch. A loud watch. Okay, someone’s standing in my room watching me sleep and wearing a watch. A burglar? Would you wear a watch to burgle people’s houses? Maybe if you need to time things, like your getaway, like getting in and out of the house.

You’d think they’d use a quieter watch, though. Like why not an iWatch or one of those smart watches that you could also communicate with your lookout with? Although if you could afford an Apple watch, you probably wouldn’t need to burgle my house. There’s really not much to get here. I could see being robbed by a junkie, I guess (do people use that word anymore?), who was desperate for anything he could get…

Tick, tick, tick

Although if it was a burglar, wouldn’t they get on with the burgling? Why just stand there? Also, two dogs… wouldn’t one of them make some noise if a stranger was standing in my room? I can make them go ballistic by setting my coffee cup down a little too hard, how are they sleeping through an unknown person wandering around the house?

Finally I opened my eyes. My fan was on. The tick was the cord, very gently banging on the base.

I find this to be a cautionary tale about my own tendency to jump to worst possible conclusions. Lately, whenever my brain gets stuck worrying about something I can’t control, I remind myself that it’s probably not a bomb. It’s surprisingly helpful!

Anyway, I was reminded of it this morning because I was meditating and I could hear the fan ticking away. I’ve been trying to meditate every day, slowly increasing the time I spend at it. I’d like to get up to a serious number — 30 minutes, maybe? — but at the moment, I’m stuck at 15. Usually, my last couple minutes of meditation isn’t meditating so much as it is wondering if I remembered to set a timer, before finally asking Alexa how much time is left. The last few days I’ve gotten that number down to seconds — yesterday I think it was fifteen of them! — but until I’ve made it to the end without asking several times, I know I’m not ready to bump up the number.

But I really like meditating. Six months I would have said (like probably almost everyone reading!), “Oh, I can’t meditate, my brain just never shuts up.” But someone told me that prayer is talking to God, meditating is listening, and when I think of meditating as listening, the experience becomes… well, I think what it’s supposed to be. My brain still doesn’t shut up, and I have in fact, gotten so distracted by it that I’ve totally forgotten that I was supposed to be meditating until the timer goes off and I realize, oops, I picked up the computer or whatever. And the dogs can be seriously distracting. They think me sitting up with my eyes closed, doing nothing but breathing, either means that I am in need of snuggles or that my hands should be busy petting them.

But some of the time, concentrating on listening, feeling my breath, and trying to exist only in the moment I’m in results in a calm that feels sustaining. And every once in a while, it’s something even more than that. I suspect it’s something like runner’s high or a flow state, but it’s an amazing sense of well-being and joy. I’ve only had it a few times, but it is well worth the fifteen minutes (soon to be twenty I hope) that I give it every morning.

Head hopping

One of the “rules” of fiction-writing that I learned while A Gift of Ghosts was getting critiqued at critiquecircle.com was that you should pick a point-of-view character and stay, absolutely consistently, in their point-of-view. Don’t show thoughts of other people, don’t show actions that they can’t see, don’t mention knowledge that they don’t have. (Critique Circle was extremely useful for me, so don’t take this a criticism of the site, please. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants useful feedback on their own writing.)

I wish I had never learned that rule.

It’s a good rule, actually. Since then I’ve read a number of works by beginning writers where head-hopping makes the narrative hard to follow and confusing. And it’s enormously helpful when writing description or setting a scene to be able to focus on what your POV character would notice or care about or feel. I stopped getting stuck on writing descriptions when I got better at remembering to think about what the POV character cares about and to use scene-setting as an opportunity to develop character. And I’m fairly sure my descriptions got a lot better, too.

But it’s also really limiting. I’ve been stuck on Grace (I know, I know, you’ve heard this so many times!) so I’ve been reading and revising early chapters, trying to figure out where this story could go. Should go. Is going? I was close to deciding to give up on her again, because even getting an ending — a good ending, a romantic ending, a charming ending! — wasn’t getting me through TO the ending. But there’s so much in it that’s fun. Their first kiss is just great. And Grace is a riot — pragmatic and romantic, efficient and flustered — she might not work for everyone, but I love her.

But I realized about six chapters in that flowing between points-of-view, not just switching at scene or chapter breaks, but actually flowing from one point-of-view character to another, would really help the narrative. All the points where it’s confusing are times when switching to Dillon for a while and seeing out of his eyes would make everything so much simpler. And most of the fun belongs to Grace and Noah, but most of the tension belongs to the ghosts. Right now, it feels like it seesaws between fun chapters and tense chapters, and if I blended — no, head-hopped, if I head-hopped — it would be much easier to keep both the fun and the tension going at the same time.

I don’t know what I’m going to do with this realization. NOT go back and start Grace over. And not revise the whole thing either. But I think I’m going to start breaking the rule about no head-hopping and write what I want to write, where I want to write it, focusing on what makes the story easier for me to tell. And if it gets confusing, well, I’ll confront that issue when I get there. Words on pages are a lot easier to fix than words that don’t exist.

Writing this reminded me that back in October I was thinking that POV was my problem with this book. I did get freer with POV after that, but not within scenes — I stuck to switching POV characters using breaks. I wonder if I’d started head-hopping back then if I’d be done now? And that’s not a useful thought so I’m not going to pursue it. But someday soon I’m going to get back to writing 1000 words a day, whether they’re good or bad, and I really hope that eventually those words add up to a story I feel good about.

Meanwhile, a few lines that were alone almost enough to keep me writing yesterday:

“You can’t escape destiny with a to-do list, Grace,” Lucas said.

Grace gave him a cold stare. “Perhaps you can’t, but I certainly intend to.

Serenity

I had a moment of thinking when I woke up this morning, “Thursday, must blog, what am I going to write about?” and then I thought, “Duh.” Seriously, it was a very half-awake thought because in reality I am pretty much bubbling over with excitement, wanting to babble my stuff to anyone who will listen.

So yesterday I bought my RV, a Winnebago Travato 59K. Although maybe I should start calling her a camper? It seems like the class B people prefer to use camper or van in reference to their homes-on-wheels, class B being the type of RV I chose. I am… excited. And scared. And excited again. And overwhelmed and excited and amused and excited and… yeah. I’ll stop there.

I haven’t gotten to take possession of her yet. It takes the service guys a couple of days to prep her and get her ready and then we get to do a big walkthrough where I check everything and they teach me everything I need to know. The walkthrough can take several hours, so I’m not sure when that will happen but not before the weekend, I suppose. Apart from any other issues, I need to arrange for a ride, since obviously, I’ll be driving away in Serenity.

Yep, that’s her name. It’s probably a cliche for geeks to name their vehicles Serenity, but I was thinking of doing so anyway — not just for the Firefly reference, but for the reminder to self that serenity is the true destination of my journeys. Then R said, upon seeing a picture, “You must name it Serenity.” Decision made. (In that list of adjectives up above, the amusement is because I am so very, very excited about Serenity. Oh, the irony.)

Serenity is, if it’s not obvious, very small. Well, relatively speaking. If you’re used to driving a Honda Civic, as I am, she feels pretty big. But more like a mini-van than an RV. And storage is going to be tight, even tighter than I imagined it would be. When I was looking at the overhead compartments yesterday and the depth of the drawers, I quailed. But just for a moment. There’s not going to be any bringing along of stuff “just in case” and I suspect that I’m going to have to make some hard decisions. I have a frying pan that I love and use all the time. I know exactly how it heats, just how food will cook in it, and I would have said that bringing it along was non-negotiable. (Little side note: it took me years to realize how important cooking tools are, but all pans are not alike and a good pan that you know well makes such a difference for consistent cooking.) But my frying pan has a long handle, which is going to waste a ton of space. Decisions, decisions.

Some of the other decisions are going to be interesting, too. I’ve gone through my pantry and gotten rid of stuff already, but I kept things that I thought I might need. So I’ve still got sugar and brown sugar and confectioner’s sugar and honey and molasses and agave syrup. If I’d bought a Class C RV, I probably would have packed all that into a corner somewhere. But with Serenity? Nope. I’ll keep some honey, because that is the sweetener that I most consistently use, but all the rest has got to go. And then spices and herbs — I still have a full shelf of the spices I knew I needed. But Serenity does not have a full shelf to give to spices. I’m going to go from a pantry the size of a full-length bedroom closet and cabinets with multiple shelves devoted to food to one cabinet, the size of maybe half an overhead airplane bin, for pantry goods. From a full-size refrigerator and freezer to a dorm-room size fridge. It sounds impossible. And so, so, so exciting!