Sarah Wynde's Blog, page 70

Motivation

Both days of this weekend came perilously close to being the first day of 2016 on which I didn’t do any writing at all. But I eked out a couple of sentences both evenings, so my streak is not technically broken.

I say technically because I’m sort of dubious about yesterday’s words. On Saturday, I knew the words were incoherent and probably not going to last, but that’s okay, because it’s a first draft and incoherent words can get fixed. It’s much tougher to fix no words than it is to fix bad words. Yesterday, though, I was so utterly blank that I couldn’t come up with anything. Close to three hours spent flipping in and out of the file and my mind stayed stubbornly empty. I finally decided that I’d just write part of something that might happen later, so I switched PoV’s and wrote a couple paragraphs of Grace thinking. I know those words won’t get used. They don’t fit anything that should be going on now.

I’m not sure why I’m so stuck. Apart from the distractions of life, of course. Usually this level of stuck would mean that I took a wrong turn somewhere, that I’ve headed down a dead end. But this is where I wanted to be. I may have to go back and re-read the whole thing — so, so, so dangerous — to see where I should go. But yes, I am afraid to do that because so often that drives me back to starting over and I am just not going to do that again. I’ve got 57K good words. Another 20K and I have a book. But at the moment, it sure doesn’t feel like a book to me. *sigh.

Today’s plan: well, R is home for the one full day that he will be here on his spring break. So really, I’m going to be kind to myself. I’m not going to stress about getting lots of writing done or cleaning or organizing or anything. I’m going to try to enjoy his company. I’ll lose another day this week when I take him back to Sarasota, but I’m going to not worry about that either. Out of the two years that I’ve spent working on this book, another two days is not going to make a difference. But I do hope that I can figure out where I’ve gone wrong and what to do about it. I have the annoying feeling right now that as I was falling asleep last night I had an idea and it’s not coming back to me, but maybe that’s an illusion, anyway. Ideas when falling asleep often seem great but that doesn’t mean they are.

The Earthquake Theory of Karma

By 8:58 AM, I had burned myself on hot oil, cut myself on a can, and stepped on something sharp, either a tiny piece of glass or a thorn. When I turned around too fast and hit my elbow on my vacuum cleaner, I knew it was probably time to go back to bed. But I have a belief that keeps me going on days like today — the earthquake theory of karma. Basically, when lots of little things are going wrong, I think it’s the universe’s way of bleeding off your bad luck, like the tiny earthquakes that can alleviate stress on a fault line and prevent a major earthquake from happening. So when I’m poking at my foot, trying to figure out what just caused that drop of blood and whether it’s still in there, I’m trying to remember to be grateful that I’m not going to get in a car accident today or drop dead from a heart attack or experience whatever big bad luck might have been headed my way.

Yes, I know it’s ridiculous. But it’s still comforting.

And I’m feeling the need of comforting. I keep reminding myself that this is my choice, my decision, and I can change my mind if I want to. But the fun part of my adventure is a long way away. I’m currently in the stressful part of deciding what needs to be done before I can put the house on the market and what I’m going to keep and how. I’ve done this kind of major purge before, but not nearly as extreme as I’m planning to do it now. When I moved from California to Florida, I got rid of everything… or rather, everything that didn’t have sentimental value. That is a really important distinction.

In the ten years since, I’ve gained lots and lots of stuff, some of it just from living, which is easy to let go of, if tedious to go through, but plenty of it from processes that give it sentimental value. So I look around my room now. There’s a LLadro centaur sitting on my bookcase. I bought it in Spain when I was 17 years old. It lived in my parents house until my mom died, but now I have it. Am I getting rid of it?

Next to it is the entire collected works of Lois McMaster Bujold, everything except her last book, which I have electronically. Am I keeping them? In the corner is a Beanie Baby hedgehog, one of the only stuffed animals left from when Rory was that age. He had dozens, of course, as kids do, but they’re all gone, except for this little hedgehog that’s been keeping me company for the past ten years. Can I say good-bye? In front of it, a tile with Rory’s five-year-old handprint on it. How can I possibly toss that out? And on, and on, and on, it goes.

But I’m basically choosing to re-purchase everything that gets stored. If I rent a storage unit big enough for some items of furniture, it will probably cost $100/month, for a 10 x 10 unit, for maybe at most 400 usable square feet. (I’m calculating 10 x 10 x 4 feet high, but obviously it could be taller. Equally obviously, nothing packs without some room for air, and I can’t just stack all my possessions neatly to the ceiling, so not all the space can be used.) Say I live in the RV for three years, minimum. (And I think those three years will fly by — it could be much longer.) Every item is costing me some portion of $3600. Would I spend $9 on my Lladro centaur? Sure thing. On my Beanie Baby hedgehog… hmm. $50 for the collected works of Bujold? A bargain, but if I was in the bookstore, I wouldn’t choose to spend $50 that way. For Rory’s handprint? Maybe I’ll just drop that on the floor and keep my fingers crossed that it breaks, heartless mother that I am.

I own three sets of china: my mother’s, my grandmother’s, and my great-grandmother’s. The sentimental value is obviously enormous. When I use my grandmother’s plates, I remember Christmas dinners in Bethlehem, putting olives on my fingers, wiggling in my seat while I waited for a pause in the conversation before I could ask to be excused. When I use my great-grandmother’s dishes, I think of her and I think of my aunt, who sent them to me. When I use my mom’s china… you get the picture. But I hardly ever use any of it. Does it really make sense to put it in a storage unit racking up costs indefinitely? It’s not like R wants to inherit three sets of china.

Meanwhile, of course, I’ve barely managed to write a word of Grace because I’ve been so distracted. I write sentences here and there but the chapter I’m in is the hellish “time passes” chapter. I was joking to my friend Lynda yesterday that I should really just write, “Chapter Seventeen, Time passes. Chapter Eighteen,” and get on with it. While walking the dogs this morning I told myself firmly that there is no putting the house on the market until the book is done, so the longer I delay on the book, the longer everything will take. It’s a good mental promise, but instead of coming home and starting to write, I came home and started to clean out the garage. But I am making that commitment — I’m going to finish the book before I try to sell the house. I’ll just be doing all the stuff to get ready to sell the house along the way.

Tomorrow I pick up R in Sarasota for spring break. While he’s home, we’ll go through all this stuff and see what tough decisions he wants to make. I have a feeling it’ll be easy for him and he’ll say “toss it all” but I’ve still got lots of his toys so there might be some serious nostalgia happening first. The Playmobil train is definitely going to be hard to say good-bye to. I might have to set it up and play with it a little first. And somewhere there are some Thomas the Tank Engine pieces that I really might simply not be able to let go of.

So, decisions, decisions. It’s not going to be easy!

Water

Last night, I walked into the kitchen to get a snack and found water on the floor. Not a lot of water. A tiny trail in the cracks between the tiles.

Two years ago, I would have said, “Huh, must have spilled something,” or blamed it on the dogs. I would have wiped it up with a paper towel and forgotten all about it within ten minutes. Not anymore!

I crouched down on the floor and examined that water like it held the secrets to the universe. It didn’t touch the walls, so it couldn’t be coming from a wall, thank goodness. It didn’t touch the refrigerator, which halfway makes sense, since I never hooked up the water to the fridge again after the debacle of July 2014, where a pinprick hole turned into a major remodel, but also ruined my hope that maybe I’d spilled from the filter water without realizing. It did not appear to be connected to the dogs’ bowl, so it probably wasn’t them being messy.

Finally, I opened the cabinet under the sink and damn it, damn it, damn it, everything was wet. My faucet has a flexible head — the kind that you can pull out to spray water, like a shower hose — and I’d noticed before that it had been leaking. Apparently, the head was loose enough that when it was sitting in the stand, water was draining into the faucet and out below. I’d washed a bunch of dishes earlier and the whole time, water had been drip-drip-dripping into the cabinet. Argh!

I pulled everything out, mopped it up, tightened the faucet, watched for drips, (none, whew), and grumbled. But by the time I was done, I felt like it was the universe saying to me, “yes, really–sell the house!” and I felt joyful again.

Over the course of the six days that I’ve been contemplating this idea, I’ve gone from “well, maybe sometime” to “in 2017, I will” to “perhaps by September I’ll be ready to list the house” to “how soon could I have the house ready to put on the market?” At the moment, I think the answer to that question is May: I have some work scheduled to be done in May that should really be done before I try to sell. But May feels awfully far away. I know it’s really not — I’ve got plenty to do between now and then, including finishing writing Grace! And September still probably makes a lot more sense. But I already want to start planning where I’ll be going & how I’ll be living, not keeping a wary eye out for puddles and worrying about whether I need to get a plumber.

Today the realtor comes and this afternoon, if I manage to write some good words, I might take myself off to an RV lot to see if I can test-drive the model I’m thinking about. Good times!

Ten year blogaversary

I mentioned this on Monday, but I started writing this blog ten years ago today.

Time is strange.

Yep, that’s my deep, profound, thoughtful cliche on this anniversary of a decade gone by.

I would not have expected this day to be particularly meaningful to me. My blog has always really been more of a way for me to save my memories and talk to myself than any sort of grand project. I’ve never made any money on it, never intended or tried to, and I don’t pay much attention to whether people are reading it, except for trying to make sure I say hi when people say hi to me. For a long, long time my only reader was me, and when a couple of you started reading regularly, it took me a while to wrap my head around the fact that you were there at all. (Hi, Judy! Hi, Carol! Hi, Barbara! Hi, Other More Anonymous Readers!)

It’s sort of like remembering the anniversary of buying a journal, or maybe buying a kitchen appliance. Like, “Whoa, this is the ten year anniversary of my electric kettle — I sure have made a lot of tea over the years.” I will not notice the ten year anniversary of my electric kettle and I honestly have no idea why I remembered this anniversary, except that I noticed the archive list last month and realized March 2006 was the earliest date in it.

But ten years is actually a remarkable amount of life. Ten years ago, I lived in Santa Cruz, with no intention of moving. I am fairly sure that we were living in a run-down, mold-ridden, rental house where my bedroom window was permanently cracked to let an electric cord through (to the sump pump under the house), and if we weren’t living there, we were about to be.

Ten years ago, my son had recently been diagnosed as having severe, even profound, learning disabilities. Ten years ago, I had a job that paid me well for work that I was very good at and very stifled by. Ten years ago, I had an adorable puppy who I already loved with all my heart.

If you had said to me ten years ago, “What’s your life going to be like in ten years?” and then, “What do you want your life to be like in ten years?”, I would have answered with, “I have no idea,” followed by “I have no idea.”

But if you had said to me back then that in ten years, I would be living in a cute three-bedroom house in Florida with a window seat and French doors to a patio with a swimming pool; that my son would be in college, with multiple scholarships, on the verge of presenting at his second academic conference; that I would be eking out a precarious living by writing fiction; and that the adorable puppy would still be as adorable and would have an adorable companion, I would have laughed at you. That set of fantasies would have seemed as unrealistic as they come, with the second dog pushing the whole thing over the edge into haha, ridiculous.

And yet… here we are. Here I am. That is my reality, or at least a little window on it. For some reason, it makes me want to cry. I wish I could go back to that self, who was always tired, and often depressed, being made sick, sick, sicker by the mold in that horrible house, and tell her what the future would bring. Not that it didn’t bring plenty of bad along with the good — these ten years have held more grief and loss than I could have handled knowing about back then. But it is amazing to me to look around at my life, to think about the friends that I hadn’t even met yet, the knowledge that I didn’t have, and realize how far I’ve come, how much I’ve changed.

But the thing about looking back on ten years is that it also inspires me to look forward. Where do I want to be ten years from now? What do I want out of the next ten years of my life?

I got here by taking chances. By doing things that seemed impulsive and scary. Moving to Florida was huge, quitting my job even bigger, dropping out of graduate school terrifying (and yet still the right call, I think). What terrifying things do I want to do in the next ten years?

Five days ago, I thought, “Maybe I should sell the house and buy an RV. It could be my tiny, mobile house. I could live in it with the dogs, write just the way I do here, cook in my tiny kitchen, and drive around the country looking for beautiful sunsets.”

Four days ago, I started telling people — my dad, my brother, my friend Tim — that I was thinking about it.

Three days ago, I started researching RVs.

Two days ago, I stared cleaning out my garage and closets.

Yesterday, I called a realtor.

Today, I’m making it real. I’ve decided. I’m going to embark on the biggest adventure of my life. It’s exciting and terrifying and exciting again. Getting rid of all of my things is going to be hard and painful and take forever; selling the house is going to simultaneously be enormously freeing and agonizing; the process of buying an RV frightens me like nothing I’ve done since buying a house; and it will be ever so strange when Rory has a school break and I offer him a tent to sleep in, not to mention holidays.

But ten years from now, I want to look back and think, “Wow, you might have been crazy, but you sure were brave.”

Meanwhile, of course, I’m going to finish writing Grace. And even before that, I’m going to walk the dog who’s been gazing at me ever-so-plaintively for the last thirty minutes.

Status update and daydreams

Writing this weekend was absolutely horrible. Yesterday came very, very close to being the first day of 2015 in which my total word count was less than zero. In fact, it might actually have achieved that dubious honor. But I’m not counting it as such because even if I did delete more words than I wrote, I did write at least a few sentences and the words I deleted were not working anyway. I also discovered my problem, which is what I really needed. Writing work happened, in other words, even if the word count doesn’t show it. Besides, I haven’t been tracking my word count this year, because tracking word count just stresses me out instead of inspiring me.

My problem, alas, was that my ending doesn’t work. It’s strange the number of ways writing can not work. You’d think it would be so straightforward: do the sentences make sense? Do they line up one after another in a proper order? Congratulations, your writing works! But, no, that’s not how it goes. You’ve always got the question of whether they’re good sentences, interesting sentences, but you’ve also got the question of whether they fulfill the promises that the story makes.

In this case, events changed in little ways to the point where my ending no longer made sense. Noah was making a choice that worked for the situation I expected him to be in when I started writing. But along the way, little things happened — not big things, not huge changes, just minor drifts away from my mental image, natural embellishments to my mental map. And suddenly I was at a blank wall, no further progress possible, until I realized that Noah — the real Noah, the Noah on the page, Noah as he had taken form while I wrote — that Noah was nowhere close to being in a dark enough place to do what I was trying to write him to do.

There was much wailing and ranting and pulling of hair when I realized this. Honestly, it’s a good thing I write on a computer and save my file in multiple spaces, because if I’d had one paper copy, I might have taken it out into the backyard and set the damn thing on fire. My frustration level was high enough that watching it go up in smoke might have been really satisfying. But then I would have woken up this morning thinking, “now what?” regarding my own life, instead of spending yesterday evening pondering “now what?” regarding Noah’s life. And my pondering did get me places. I might spend some time writing in some circles, my words might not drive toward the conclusion the way I expected them to, and I probably am not going to finish writing this week (DAMN IT!), but I have a direction this morning and a plan for how I can keep what I liked about my ending and write around the parts that didn’t work. So, progress. Slow and frustrating progress, but progress.

This week is a weird milestone for me. I should wait to write about it until Wednesday, but ten years ago Wednesday, I was at SXSW for work and a co-worker convinced me I should start a blog. To say that I didn’t take it seriously for the first few years would be a dramatic understatement. I had various computer problems, a busy life, and a strong sense of privacy, of not wanting to reveal much about my circumstances to potential professional contacts. I didn’t have my name all over the blog or anything, but there’s no real such thing as anonymity on the internet. Anything you write might someday be discovered by a real-world contact or the whole world. In those first few years, posts were sparse. But it’s been ten of them and wow, ten years is really a lot of life.

It makes me think back — and think forward, too. I think it’s time to make some of my daydreams reality. Not the ones involving magic kingdoms under the sea or small towns where people fall in love but the ones involving my day-to-day life. But there’s a dog stuffing her nose under my fingers, saying, please, please, please, her tail wagging, so more about that the next time I write. Happy Mondays! May all your work this week delight you. Hey, I like that wish so much I’m going to make it for me, too — may all our work this week delight us!

Book reviews (the ones I write)

One of my goals for this year — which sounds sort of grandiose, but is better than calling it a resolution, I suppose — was to record the books I read on Goodreads with at least a few words about each one. This wasn’t about public consumption. I wasn’t planning on writing the type of reviews that would help other people choose their books. I just wanted to remember the books I read.

Side note: what a weird word “read” is. Same spelling, two different pronunciations depending on tense. I actually reworded a sentence in that first paragraph so the two different pronunciations wouldn’t happen in rapid succession, because it felt so disorienting. English is a lovely language in many ways, so flexible, so rich, but it is so strange sometimes. Ahem. Back to our previously scheduled discussion…

Obviously, it sounds pretty brainless not to be able to remember the books I read. Is it even reading if six months later, I retain nothing of the story? But when I’m on a roll, I can read two or three books a day, and three hours of mild entertainment does not necessarily stick in long-term storage.

But my goal hasn’t been easy to accomplish, mostly because the last few books I read (or didn’t read, as the case may be) would have gotten reviews that might have seemed scathing. One of them started great. I might even have paid for it after reading the Look Inside. But four chapters in, I was forced to concede complete and utter boredom. I wanted to sleep more than I wanted to read, and it wasn’t night time. That… is not a nice review.

Another one I finished, but mostly because I kept wondering whether it could get more stupid. Answer: yes! It could, it did. It was the “everything AND the kitchen sink” marathon of romantic cliches. (The author, incidentally, is a best-selling indie and probably phenomenally wealthy by this time, so who am I to judge?)

A third was readable but about a third of the way through I was pretty sure that the mystery was going to turn out to be the painfully obvious “teenage girl was being sexually abused” and by halfway through I was sure of it and so I skipped to the end. I was right. As a plot device, the discovery that the teenage girl was an abuse victim is so unrewarding. It’s the justification for everything, anything, and it’s never a surprise.

Those reviews are exactly the kind of content I’d like to keep with the books’ names, so that when I see the books again in my Kindle cloud, I can refresh my memory of what my experience with the book was. But I don’t want to post them publicly because they’re so personal. They’re about my experience with the book, not thoughtful, well-reasoned, articulate assessments of reading material for someone else’s edification. For all I know, on another day, I might have been much more tolerant of books 1 and 3. (Not 2, I would never have liked that one. But lots of people apparently do, so hey, good for them. All reading is good reading, IMO.)

Anyway, I’m not sure where I was going with this, except that I wish Kindle had better tools for keeping private reviews. I sometimes make notes on a book’s cover or first page, especially when it’s a DNF, but then I have to download the book again to see the note. Hmm, and it just occurred to me to wonder whether the drive-by Dresden fan who only reads authors who agree with their precise taste and politics is subconsciously influencing me, despite my intellectual disdain for their attitude. I might have to think more about that.

Either way, though, I’m failing in my goal to review more of the books I read, and I’m going to try to do better. As soon as I finish writing the book I’m writing. Four chapters to go, I think, but they are, of course, big ones. And I might sneak another one in there, just because it would be fun.

My bipolar book

Someday, when Grace is long finished and I haven’t read it in years, haven’t thought about it in ages, I’m going to pick up a copy and think, “Right, the book that made me crazy, I remember this one.”

Friday was fantastic. The words flowed like they haven’t since… oh, sometime in A Lonely Magic or maybe even back when I was writing fanfiction. They just poured out of me.

But this weekend was anguished. Torture, misery, deep reflections on whether I should quit writing and what I wanted to do with my life instead. Seriously, I had a brief moment of thinking maybe I could go back to waitressing. I can never go back to waitressing. I was a great waitress, but that was a long time ago, and I don’t have nearly the stamina or patience that it would take to do it again. But it was that kind of weekend.

Today I finished the chapter I was working on. And I like it. It makes me laugh. The characters are such… people. They’re so real to me, so alive. And these are the dead ones.

I think I’ve also managed to embrace the weirdnesses. This book, which will someday, fingers crossed, be finished, is going to be the weirdest book I have ever written and that’s saying something, given the others.

Bittersweet

Before I started writing Grace, I knew what it was about. It was about being the normal one in a family of people with gifts (Grace) and about being the different one in a family of normal people (Noah) and about finding out that you can be yourself–whoever you are–and still belong.

I read that and sigh. It still sounds like a good book to me. That’d be a good book, wouldn’t it?

But that’s not what that book I’ve written is at all. Not even to the teeny-tiny-most minute degree. This is a book about moving on. About letting go. And I don’t have the slightest idea how it turned out this way. The name doesn’t make any sense at all anymore — not that I’m going to change it, because what would I change it to? But Grace was supposed to realize her own gifts, along with giving Noah the gift of acceptance, and I really don’t see that happening at this point. Instead… well, I won’t spoil it. Suffice to say that that’s not the direction in which I’m headed. But this fairytale’s ending is going to be bittersweet, I think.

My Monday to-do list worked out pretty well, though. Oh, I still haven’t folded the laundry. Ha, I should maybe do that. But I did clean the kitchen and I did work on painting the bathroom and I did walk the dogs, and most importantly, I did manage to map out the remaining chapters of Grace. I had one last plot point that was unresolved and sticky, and I figured it out this morning. It leads to a short story that’s not going to be included in the main story, but that’s okay. I’d actually really like to write more short stories that are scenes — not full-fledged plots, but more just moments in the day. I’m not sure I’d feel right about publishing them, but I think I would find them soothing to write. Low pressure!

And now back to it — I’m glad I know what comes next, but it feels like I’ve still got a lot to write.

Pendulum swings

This weekend I decided that A Gift of Grace was abysmal, unreadable, the worst thing I’ve ever written.

ARGH!

I wound up reading the current version from beginning to end, and concluded that I’m just in a little bit of a murky middle space. I know how it ends, I know a couple more scenes before it ends, but I don’t entirely know how to get from where I am to there. So that’s going to be my goal for this week, to make it through the murky middle and onto the solid end ground. Or at the very least, map out the path through the murky middle.

My secondary goal is to stop beating myself up for not having finished yet. I wanted to finish by the end of August. Ha. And then the end of November and then the end of every month since. I can’t believe that we’re entering March and I’m still not done. But being mean to myself about that is not helping me in any way. If I could take all the time I waste telling myself how incompetent I am and turn it into time that I am writing real words, I’d be doing so much better.

Of course, that’s always easier said than done. I tell myself to be nice to me and yet I often just can’t figure out how. I used to make to-do lists when I felt overwhelmed so I could start checking items off. It gives a nice sense of accomplishment on days when the universe makes it impossible to feel complete. Item #1 on the kind of to-do list should always be “Make a to-do list” so that I have something to check off as soon as I’m done. Maybe I’ll start there today.

To-do list

#1: Make a list.

#2: Write a Monday morning blog post

#3: Answer emails and clean out in-box…

Hmm, and it’s 7:07 AM and look, I’m off to a much better start than I would ever given myself credit for, since #3 is done, #2 is almost done, and #1 will soon be done.

#4: Outline all the remaining scenes in Grace.

And that’s the stumper. But it’s a great goal and I think I’ll get started on it now. The nice thing is that having established that it’s my goal, I can be working on it while I walk the dogs, clean the kitchen, fold the laundry and maybe finish painting the bathroom. And those are all good goals, too.

End of the month check-in: I have not yet broken my streak. The words weren’t many yesterday or Saturday or even last week as a whole, but I’ve written every day of 2016. Go, me!

My Flock

My dad’s dog is here visiting for a week. I’m sure I’ve posted pictures of him before, but he’s just about the size of Zelda, if a bit heavier, golden and fluffy. He’s a mix of poodle and something else, maybe cocker spaniel? I should remember, but I don’t.

At any rate, three dogs underfoot and on the bed is somehow qualitatively different than two dogs. Instead of having a couple of dogs, I have a flock of dogs. And they are a flock, not a pack, because they are all fluffy. It’s a little collection of fluff balls. Alone, none of them are too, too fluffy — well, B pushes the line. But put them together and suddenly, it’s a serious fluff experience. I would love to get a really good picture of the three of them, but I can never quite get all of them to be cute at the same moment, unless I’m in the kitchen, in which case I don’t have a camera around.

And I am babbling in order to avoid the reality that it’s already past noon and I have written exactly one sentence this morning. I should try to write a second one, because maybe it would lead to a third and then a fourth. I haven’t broken my writing streak yet — I have written every day of 2016 — but the past two days were not good writing days. I’m annoyed at myself, because I can see how I’m being resistant, even sort of understand why, and yet… knowing my reasons doesn’t help me overcome the sensation of wanting to do anything, anything other than write.

I’ve even watched a lot of television. I started watching Person of Interest because of a clip online about the dog, Bear. I am fairly sure I got hooked mostly because I wanted a distraction and it fit the bill, but I’m definitely hooked now. Sometimes it crosses the line into hokey-ness and melodrama and I definitely need to exercise my willing suspension of disbelief, sometimes to a fairly extreme level, but it is, unexpectedly, a show with incredibly fun, powerful female characters.

Ugh, and I just got totally sucked into an Internet rabbit hole of reading about the characters because I wanted to link to my favorite one. But the links I found were all so spoiler-ific that I will not do that to you! I’m also feeling a little bummed that I spoiled myself. Apparently my favorite character (Shaw) misses most of Season 4, because the actress was out on maternity leave. Ironically, the actress also played a character I loved in the television show Life and also disappeared from that show to have a baby. I guess it’s nice that she likes kids! And sort of funny, given the seriously tough, kickass characters she plays. I’d love to see her playing the same type of character pregnant. That would be… huh, you know I bet someone has written the fanfic of that. Okay, I’m not going to fall down that rabbit hole, but I am going to stop letting myself be distracted and go stare at my own story world for a while. But Person of Interest — quite fun if you can suspend your disbelief and don’t mind lots and lots and lots of guns.