Sarah Wynde's Blog, page 71

Grace update

So I am not quite, but very close, to having written as far as I ever have in A Gift of Grace. In other words, I’ve gotten past where I left off in the first version, almost to where I left off in the second version, and past where I left off in the third version. I’m calling that good news. Except I keep thinking I should be done and then discovering that I’m nowhere close.

I suspect that the editing of this one is going to be more challenging than I want it to be, too, because after so many versions, I don’t always remember what’s still in and what’s out. I am definitely going to need good beta readers who are willing to call me out on my screw-ups. That there are screw-ups is basically guaranteed.

And that said… I told my dad on Friday that I was pretty sure Grace is the best thing I’ve ever written. Obviously, I’m not done yet, so I could still screw it up. Equally obviously, my opinion isn’t really worth all that much. I know these characters really well now. Whether a reader who hasn’t lived through all the versions will feel like she or he knows them equally well is still totally up in the air. I won’t know that for a while. I might not ever know that if it turns out to be like The Wedding Guests in terms of getting very few reviews. It might be a total mystery to me forever. But that’s okay. Sort of.

I did realize that one of my ongoing problems, apart from the truly crazy over-abundance of characters, has been time and the passing thereof. I wanted this book to be like Ghosts in terms of taking place over months and having a romance that was a slow and plausible real build. People don’t fall in love in two days. They fall in infatuation and love is what happens over the course of time. Akira and Zane have, to me, real love. They met, were attracted, flirted, started bonding, slept together, kept bonding, spent a lot of time together, enjoyed one another’s company, liked one another for their differences, faced danger together, and live happily ever after. Grace and Noah might end this book at closer to attracted, flirted, started bonding… because 45,000 words into it, Noah has spent a single night in Tassamara. In book time, he met Grace yesterday. That is not love. We might be closer to a Happy For Now ending than a Happy Ever After ending. (And that said, I suspect that this is a problem of all romantic suspense. I’ve not really started examining timelines for my favorite books, but I suspect that ten days from first meeting to together & in love is pretty typical for novels, even if it is a terrible idea for real life.)

But I’m not letting that realization bother me. This book is very definitely not what I thought it was going to be, not what I wanted it to be. It doesn’t match the outline that I wrote for it (in 2013!) at all, with the sole exception of having a hero who hears ghosts and thinks he’s crazy. I’m not even sure that the title works anymore. But all of that is okay, too. Onward!

Scatter-brained Day/ Storm Front semi-review

I’m having the kind of day where thirty windows are open on my computer screen and I can never finish one thing before the next thing has distracted me. Ooh, shiny over here. Ooh, urgent over there. Ooh, what the heck is this? Example: I have started at least three new posts on my blog. I keep losing them, not because the computer is doing anything, but because I open a new tab and wind up elsewhere and forget where the past post was. I finally started closing the long line of windows down at the bottom of my screen and got back to this one, the very first one I started about five hours ago. Sigh.

My scatter-brained day goes along with my disjointed week. I’ve been having the kind of week where I want to rant about stupid things on the internet and have to try to stop myself. Stupid things like if Kanye West was female, (s)he would have been involuntarily committed already. And probably with a conservatorship locked into place that (s)he would have vast trouble getting out of. And I can’t decide whether it’s more annoying that a woman would never be allowed the craziness he’s spouting or sad that no one is getting him the help he needs. Maybe it’s both. But even more annoying/sad is the fact that I actually don’t care about Kanye West at all or really know anything about him apart from what shows up in the headlines of my news feed, so why am I wasting my time with an opinion? It’s the measure of a distracted week. I’ve had to stop looking at Facebook because it’s been so hard not to respond to things where the stupid just hurts.

I tried reading Jim Butcher’s first Harry Dresden novel, Storm Front, this week. I did not get far. I wanted to send a friend to a decent post on the sexism in the book and I couldn’t find it — far too many of the posts I found were trying to defend the book from charges of sexism when really, no, the book is so over-the-top misogynistic that it is unreadable for me. Obviously, other people’s mileage may vary. But here’s a run-down of my experience reading the book, saved for posterity:

A lengthy description of Murphy, the female cop, pushes a few buttons because it’s so sexualized, but eh, whatever. I keep reading.

“an indelicate sound from so small a woman”. I roll my eyes. Criticizing her behavior in relation to her gender? Totally cheesy.

On opening doors: “try and convict me if I’m bad person for thinking so. I enjoy treating a woman like a lady… it irritates the hell out of Murphy who had to fight and claw and play dirty with the hairiest men in Chicago to get as far as she has.” The narrator, Dresden, prioritizes his enjoyment over her irritation, even as he acknowledges how hard she’s had to work to get where she is. So unpack that a little — why has she had to work so hard? Because men don’t respect her. And what is Harry doing? Not respecting her. Prioritizing his feelings over hers. Treating her feelings, in fact, with total disdain. He wants to do what he wants to do, he wants to treat her as he likes, and he doesn’t care how she feels about it.

Okay, so Harry’s an ass, but then Butcher says “she took an odd sort of comfort in our ritual” — which means the author is claiming that she wants to be treated like a lady when she’s upset. YUCK. That’s rape-culture in action. She says she doesn’t like it, but you can ignore her, because she really does. So sexist. So insulting. But I keep reading, because hey, lots of people love this guy and I can get through it.

Next, though, Harry decides the killer is a woman, because “Woman are better at hating than men. They can focus is better, let it go better. Hell, witches are just plain meaner than wizards. This feels like feminine vengeance of some kind to me.” Murphy calls him out on his chauvinism and he gets angry, despite that clearly being a totally sexist comment. It doesn’t get much more sexist than stereotyping half of humanity as better at hating and meaner.

Murphy smiled, “a curving of her lips that was a vibrantly feminine expression, making her look entirely too pretty to be such a hardass.” Gender stereotyping,

saying she’s too pretty to be tough. Ick.

Next, “Murphy set the hook a second later. She looked up at my eyes for a daring second before she turned away, her face tired and honest and proud. “I need to know everything you can tell me, Harry. Please.” “Classic lady in distress. For one of those liberated, professional women, she knew exactly how to jerk my old-fashioned chain around.” Bad enough that he’s viewing her as a lady in distress, but he (Butcher) is writing her as manipulative, as playing at being a lady in distress in order to control the guy. A female character using female wiles — a glance direct in the eyes, a plea — to manipulate a guy. And the female character is supposed to be a tough professional badass. It’s demeaning. Very unpleasant, absolutely misogynistic. She shouldn’t have to seduce the guy to get him to do his job and she shouldn’t be using seduction as a technique to get people to do their jobs. Sexist not just on the part of Dresden, sexist on the part of the author.

Next up, the client, Monica. A very thorough, very sexualized description. She’s not a middle-aged housewife, she’s a good-looking woman, tasteful makeup, fullness of mouth to look very feminine, in good shape, wholesome and all-American. She blushes and “she had a good face for blushing, fair skin that colored girlishly. It was quite fetching, really.” One could argue that it’s the noir detective stories that are sexist but Dresden is making conscious choices to equate “girlish” and “fetching”. Women are not mature equals, rational human beings with the same feelings and motivations as men, they’re sex objects and childish. Pretty much the definition of patronizing.

And then we have, “Besides, I could never resist going to the aid of a lady in distress. Even if she wasn’t completely one hundred percent sure that she wanted to be rescued by me.” This is the big strong male knows better than silly foolish woman stereotype, and from a female POV, it’s unpleasant, stupid, unsympathetic and yeah, sexist. Classic rape culture. Believe it or not, it still wasn’t the deal breaker for me, though.

Our third female character is Susan. She fainted after meeting his eyes. He likes her smirk because it does interesting things to her lips which were already attractive. She leaned toward him, deliberately letting him look down her cleavage. She quirked a smile that promised things. All of this would be okay — sure, she’s sexualized, but she’s clearly the romantic interest, so that’s not inappropriate, but then — UGH. “even though she used her charm and femininity relentlessly in pursuit of her stories, she had no concept of just how attractive she really was — I had seen that when I looked within her last year.” This is vomit-in-my-mouth horrible. “Most men are off-balance by now”. She is, in fact, a character who goes around flashing her cleavage in order to get what she wants, using that attractiveness that she doesn’t even know she’s got to manipulate poor helpless men.

“They say we wizards are subtle. But believe you me, we’ve got nothing, nothing at all, on women.” Woman italicized.

At that point, I looked at my overdrive page reader and realized I was on page 100 out of 3661 (it was a six book set) and if I kept going, I would have to put up with 36x more of this, and I closed overdrive.

The stereotypes — the girlish client, the seductive vamp, the hardboiled cop who doesn’t like to treated like a lady — are bad but not enough to stop me reading. But the way he sexualizes all of them, the way he has woman manipulating men, the way he views women as Other with a monolithic single identity that is subtle, mean, vengeful — but most profoundly the lack of empathy the character has in determining that what he enjoys/wants is more important than what the woman in the situation enjoys/wants — that’s sexism. And misogyny. And I’m told he gets better, and I do understand that the author was trying for a 1940’s noir detective style attitude, but my life is too short to bother.

And now I should go write a book. I hope your Thursdays are treating you well!

Grace as needed

I’m not sure why I woke up in a bleak mood this morning. Nothing went wrong, nothing bad happened, and yet my old enemy depression grabbed me by the throat and started beating me up.

To this level: I opened the cupboard to get the coffee and somehow knocked a glass out. It shattered on the granite countertop and I sighed and decided to finish making coffee before cleaning up. And in the 90 seconds while I scooped the coffee and ran the water, my brain kept cycling around the question of whether I could kill myself with the broken glass but still somehow make it look like an accident. I’m not suicidal. I have no intention of killing myself. But that thought process is known as suicidal ideation and it’s one of the deepest and most frustrating symptoms of depression for me. I finished making the coffee and I cleaned up the glass carefully and I fed the dogs and I tried very hard not to hate myself.

And then I opened Facebook and read this post from Anne Lamott. And you should absolutely go read the whole thing, because it is so worth it, but this line — “The author might mention in passing that we get to start a new, sillier, more self-forgiving day whenever we want to.” — that line is the gift of grace that I needed this morning.

(Really, go read the whole thing. I want to quote it all. And then read the comments, because many of them are lovely and moving, too.)

Today, I am going to be silly and self-forgiving. And I’m going to write a lot of good words, and maybe I’m even going to hunt down some Valentine’s Day chocolate (or other chocolate, I’m not picky).

And on a totally unrelated note:

Acorn squash stuffed with stuff

Yesterday’s invented recipe was acorn squash, sprinkled with ginger and cinnamon and roasted, then filled with a mix of apple, red onion, cucumber, dried cranberry, and diced chicken apple sausage. I think it would have been better if I’d used celery instead of cucumber and heated up the filling, plus the addition of some toasted pecans and goat cheese would have been amazing, but I want to save it for future reference anyway. Delicious, healthy, filling, and even AIP.

Progress, not perfection

My brain is not waking up this morning. Last night, I took an over-the-counter sleeping pill, because I’d had a couple sleepless nights in a row and knew I was over-tired, yet still wasn’t falling asleep. It was no big thing — I think night-time Tylenol, which I bought because it was on sale and regular Tylenol wasn’t, and generally speaking, if I’m driven to take a painkiller, I’m just fine with going to sleep. I avoid painkillers. Most of the time when I go look for one, it’s expired several months ago. Anyway, night-time Tylenol. Wow. Stuff works. I slept until 7:45, which is basically unthinkable for me, and it’s now 8:45 and I’m staring at the computer as if it is a mysterious technology never seen before.

Sleepless night #1 was B’s fault. Both dogs sulked when they came home from the vet. Z took a solid 24 hours to forgive me which is a very long time for her. But B spent that night alternately whimpering and making throwing-up noises, that familiar hack, hack, hack that means you should rush to get the animal off the carpet or furniture. He did not throw up once. He just kept making the noise. Ugh.

Sleepless night #2 was even more sleepless, but with less cause. At 1AM, I finally got out of bed and made myself a snack. I was starting to get annoyed at the dogs for breathing in the same room as me. It was a classic toss-and-turn sleepless night — couldn’t get the blankets right, couldn’t get the temperature right, thirsty, not thirsty, need to pee, brain in overdrive — totally maddening. Sleeplessness really would be a fast route to insanity. I was still awake, no sleep at all, at 3AM and then got up at my normal 6:30. But not as a happy camper.

I have been very determined to finish writing Grace. I told myself the other day that I wouldn’t leave the house until I finished writing the entire book. If I started running low on groceries, maybe I’d find starvation motivating. Since then I’ve gone for a walk with a friend, gone to yoga, gone to a friend’s house to write, gone to a writer’s group dinner meeting — so yeah, I haven’t stuck to that at all. But I have been really trying to write at all hours of the day.

I don’t think I mentioned when I started over again last week, probably because it was just too embarrassing. How many times can I write the same book? But I am about 15K words into the latest version and about to enter a stage where I think I can re-use a lot of what I’ve already written, so I’m hoping for a couple days where my word count looks amazing. Meanwhile, Z is being yearning and trying to slide her head under my fingers on the keyboard, so I should probably walk her first. And maybe eat some breakfast.

Getting my fingers working does not seem to have removed this hazy mental fog — I still feel like I’m just as likely to close my eyes and nap at the keyboard as write anything worth reading, but maybe a walk and some food will get me there. It’s going to have to because I am, I am, I am going to finish writing this book. Well, not today. But today I’m going to make great progress. Rachel Aaron wrote a book called something like 2K to 10K — I haven’t managed to take any of her advice and I mostly am mournful about the fact that 2K sounds like a great day to me, but today I aspire to be in that range, with words that are good and usable. For some reason my fingers really insisted on typing unusable there — I hope that’s not foreshadowing.

Cold Monday

The dogs are at the vet today getting their teeth cleaned. My house feels very quiet.

The vet tech had to drag Bartleby away. I tried to help by walking him to the door, but then had to give him a shove with my foot to get him through the door. I’m belatedly hoping it didn’t look like a kick. It wasn’t — it was a very gentle push under his tail — and it’s probably pretty obvious from my dogs’ lap-dog levels of clinginess that I don’t mistreat them, but still. The tech then carried Zelda away and her desperate eyes over his shoulder as she tried to scramble to get back to me were heart-rending. I have to keep reminding myself of how happy she was after she recovered from the first time she had her teeth cleaned. That wasn’t exactly a “cleaning” — she had teeth extracted, too, — but I’d been thinking she was getting old and slow, and she reverted to puppyhood once her teeth were fixed. I know it’s worth doing. It’s still hard.

Our morning got really messed up, too. I went outside planning a ten minute walk before we had to leave, but my car was frosted over! So strange to see the patterns of ice on the windshield. I wound up using most of that ten minutes warming up the car and getting it drivable and so the poor dogs didn’t get much of a walk. Minimal walk, no breakfast, abandoned at the vet. Poor puppies.

Yesterday was a hard writing day. I wrote words, some of them good, but I felt this great resistance. I finally realized that I’d headed in the wrong direction. I liked what I had too much to want to change it, but I needed to change it because it was slowing the story down for no good reason. I have been ruthless with this book. So many good words wasted! It’s a terrible way to write a book and I really wonder whether it’s worth it. But I think I’ll go make myself a cup of coffee and get back to work and skip the stage of bogging myself down in a morass of self-doubt today.

Friends and food

A friend dropped by the other day around eleven and we walked the dogs together. When we got back, I invited her in and offered her lunch. She did that polite demurral thing, but when I said, “Really, I’ve got plenty,” she accepted. I made us salads — mixed greens topped with chicken apple sausage, sautéed onion, apple, and toasted pecans. And on mine, a little goat cheese. She doesn’t eat dairy. Plus, balsamic vinegar. That’s a normal lunch for me, and it was no big deal to make more, but she raved about how delicious and healthy it was.

That evening, another friend stopped by to show off his new purchase — the batmobile of motorcycles, a Victory motorcycle, I’m going to say this one. It was gorgeous. I’d been in the middle of cooking dinner, so I invited him in. He said, “Are you sure you have enough?” and I said, “You might have to eat something more later, but I’ve got extra.” He came in and I chopped up some more squash and made salads that I hadn’t been planning to make, so we had steelhead trout marinated in soy sauce (gluten-free), sriracha, and lime juice and sautéed, with yellow squash sautéed with ginger, plus a salad of mixed greens, celery, radishes, and a peach honey mustard vinaigrette. He said it was probably the first salad he’d eaten in a month and the best meal he’d had in a while.

Yesterday, my same dog-walking friend came by early and walked the dogs with me again — she likes the exercise and B is much, much better at walking when there are two of us for some reason. Maybe because I can really leave him behind when someone else is holding his leash and so then he hurries to keep up? But I had coffee already made, so invited her in and made us breakfast. (She again said, “Oh, no, you don’t have to do that,” to which I answered, “I have bacon.” :)) We had eggs, scrambled with onion, spinach, cilantro, and avocado and cooked in coconut oil (to avoid the dairy), with the bacon on the side. The eggs were actually seriously delicious. Great combination of flavors, and the coconut oil worked really well. It’s a different flavor than butter would give, but a tasty flavor.

Anyway, that day — well, or 24-hour period, since it was really one day to the next — that day was once my fantasy. When I started learning how to cook, it was mostly so that I could feed myself, but there was also a wistful daydream associated with it of being able have someone drop by and whip up a meal for them in the kitchen like it was no big deal. To have a friend over and feed them without having to plan, without having to run to the grocery store or buy ingredients. To open the refrigerator and say, “what can I make with what I’ve got?” and have the meal turn out as delicious and interesting as if I was in a restaurant.

It’s taken me seventeen years or so, but I wish I could go back in time to my younger self, the me that was going through a divorce, alone in a dive-y apartment with a three year old, feeling overwhelmed and grief-stricken and angry, angry, angry, and thank her. The decision she (I) made to learn to cook was made out of frustration and financial insecurity and loneliness. I knew that if I was ever going to be the parent that R deserved, I needed to be able to feed him more than pasta and fruit. But what a good decision it was.

Edited to add: my friend Tim congratulated me on this moment by saying, “Congrats on adulting to the extreme,” which made me laugh. It is the perfect summation of how I feel.

A new month

I wrote every day during the month of January. Thirty-one days in a row, some words on Grace every single one of them. I want to take a moment to pat myself on the back and say, “good job, self, good job,” but instead, my brain demands to know how in the world I have not finished writing this book yet. Not yet 7AM, still dark, and I have already spent twenty minutes or so beating myself up.

It’s not like I’m trying to write the great American novel or anything deep and literary. I’m not worrying about symbolism or all those poetic terms I can’t remember the names of. It’s just a fun romantic ghost story. I’m not even obsessed with editing perfection! I let sentences end in prepositions. I use fragments and run-ons! I even, horror of horrors, put multiple exclamation points on the same page yesterday!! (They belong there, though. Or at least I was pretty sure yesterday that they belonged there. I might change my mind this morning.)

I suspect my big mistake of several years ago was in starting to read about writing. I wanted to improve. That was part of my million word goal, to get better and better and at the end of writing a million words, decide whether or not I wanted to try to write for a living. But I think the more I learned about writing — not grammar and punctuation, of course, but about telling a story and building characters and creating a good plot, the harder it got for me to write. All that reading is where my story-telling went wrong.

Many years ago, I had a co-worker who would remind us that it wasn’t brain surgery, “it” being whatever work thing had us stressed out. The point wasn’t that our work was easy in comparison (although it was, obviously), but that no lives depended on what we were doing. I should make that one of my imaginary inspirational posters and remind myself of it steadily. No lives depend on me getting the story right.

The worst part is, of course, that it’s actually a whole lot easier to write fast and to not revise. I constantly have to go back and version check while I’m writing — have I said this in this version? Is this how this works this time around? It’s taken me so long that I forget what I wrote and even more, I forget what changes I’ve made.

But enough whining. February goal: to write every day, to write a lot every day, to finish this book and start the next one. A friend read A Lonely Magic last night and was messaging me until late in the night. She wants the sequel and I’d really like to write it — for her, for me, for the other people who cared. I also was asked last week about an audio version of Ghosts, so I want to create that. I also want to finish Grace, do my taxes, go to yoga three times a week, paint my bathroom, walk the dogs every day, eat healthily, and win the lottery. The only one of those things that’s impossible is the last. (I never buy lottery tickets. Too cheap!)

Apparently February 1 is the new New Year’s for me. Filled with resolutions and resolve! But onward and upward, right?

Impulses

I have an impulse today to redesign my blog. This is a bad impulse. This is the kind of impulse that happens when I want to pretend that I’m accomplishing something but really I’m not.

Fortunately, I know exactly why I’m having this impulse. Grace has been going well–in fact, by my standards, remarkably well. I’m not even going to worry about jinxing myself with that statement. I’ve been having fun writing and I’ve been writing fun stuff. What could be better? But I blithely said that I was at 50K words yesterday, because I knew that I was just going to take the next 20K of words, already written for version 2, and add it to my 30K words of version 3. I knew I was going to do that. I was sure I was going to do that.

I was positive!

Yeah, I’m not going to do that.

This chapter–for those who read the last draft–is the one that takes place at the bistro, where Grace and Noah see the kids. It’s fun and entertaining, mostly Grace and Noah flirting with a bunch of Kenzi and the twins just for the fun of it. There’s nothing wrong with it. But I can’t help thinking that it’d be a lot more fun if the stakes were higher. And also, the current version of Grace and Noah have… well, I won’t spoil that. But their dynamics have changed and I can make the chapter better if I rewrite it.

I am such an impractical writer. Ugh. Well, no, I’m an impractical publisher. As a writer, I don’t care about being practical. That’s not the point. But my publisher self really, really wants my writer self to shape up and get it together and stop being so impulsive. Fortunately for Grace, the writer side still wins.

But I am going to ignore the impulse to redesign my blog. Also the impulse to browse stock photos looking at cover images. Also the impulse to take a slight break and write The Wedding Ghosts, aka Rose’s point-of-view on the wedding, which I’ve intended to write for months and months but only after I finish all the other things I have in mind, and of course, that day never comes. Hmm, I wonder if I did something like establishing that I will write that story when The Wedding Guests gets X number of reviews, whether that would be motivating to me? Eh, but I’m not in control of reviews, so that probably won’t help my motivation. I was imagining it the other day, though, and I really do like Toby. Plus, I was thinking that writing it might establish some stuff about Rose’s abilities that would help me with the ending of Grace. Argh! But no, I am not going to follow that impulse, either. I am going to go back to writing Grace. Right now!

Towels

I did laundry this weekend and actually washed ALL the things. Sheets, towels, tablecloths, clothing — by the end of the weekend, all the fabric in my house was clean. Go, me!

Except it turned out to be a terrible idea. I was also freezing all weekend long, wondering whether my heater was broken. I didn’t have two feet of snow, but the temperature was down in the 30’s and 40’s, which for us is cold. It was only on my last load of laundry that I realized that my thermostat is on the wall outside the laundry room. With the dryer running all weekend, the thermostat thought the house was lovely and warm. In my bedroom, I thought socks under the covers were barely enough to get by. Grr… or maybe I should be saying Brr…?

Post all the laundry, I needed fresh towels in my bathroom. I went looking for my favorites, the ones that belong in there. They’re blue, soft and thick, and big. Bath sheets, really, not towels. I’ve got plenty of towels, of course, but those two are the best. I couldn’t find them. I checked all the places towels might remotely hide. The other bathroom, the cupboard, the linen closet, my closet… no towels. I hadn’t seen them for a while but I’d just been assuming that they were somewhere — in a laundry basket or in the laundry room — but no.

And then I remembered — before R went back to school, he asked if he could take towels with him.

I told him, sure, of course.

He asked whether it mattered which ones he took.

I told him to take whichever ones he liked.

He pushed, said, “Are you sure? Any of them?”

I said, “Yeah, we’ve got plenty of towels. Take the ones you want.”

He started explaining to me how he really didn’t like the towels he had, because they weren’t absorbent enough and they didn’t dry fast enough and he liked softer towels, and I, frankly, tuned him out, because a) towels, not the most interesting subject, and b) I was in the middle of getting ready to have people over and thinking about food and cleaning.

In retrospect, perhaps I should have paid more attention.

There’s a part of me that’s annoyed — if I had not thought that MY towels were safely in my bathroom or laundry, I would not have told him he could take whichever towels he wanted. But mostly, I feel a mix of pleasure — I have raised a boy who is aware of the importance of quality linens, ha — and amusement — that teaches me to not pay attention when R is talking! He might even have specifically asked about the blue towels when he was telling me why the towels he had at school were not good enough. Oh, well. I do have plenty of towels, so I’ll survive.

Have I mentioned how much B loves the blow dryer? I don’t usually use a blow dryer but I’d gotten it out recently when I had to leave the house and it was cold and my hair was wet. B danced with delight. Up on his back legs, which he does not usually do, to tell me how excited he was. He knew exactly what it was and he loves it. Since then, I’ve been blowing him dry after his bath. It’s his favorite thing. Z watches us from two feet away, a little jealous of the doting attention that B’s getting but also really reluctant to come near the thing that makes noise. She’s not fond of noisemakers that might be vacuum cleaners.

Anyway, the other day we went for a walk in the rain. Typically, B refuses to walk in the rain. That day, he thought about it at the door and decided to come with us. I was surprised, but when we got home, he went straight to the spot where I’ve blown him dry (a floor outlet) and sat down. It was a very clear demand. My dogs have me so well trained.

Filing

I decided today that it was time to tackle the filing that I have let pile up for… ahem. A while. (I have no idea how long, but if I ever make it to the bottom of the pile, I will probably be embarrassed by the answer.)

It was a strategic decision: when everything needs to be done and cleaning is feeling overwhelming, start with one corner, then move on.

I got maybe halfway through. Maybe. Could be closer to 1/3 through. Then I decided that I needed to go do something else for a while, because it was causing sensations of impending doom. Do you have ever that feeling that life is completely out of your control and that your feeble attempt to keep track of stuff is throwing rocks at the incoming tide? Yeah, not my favorite feeling. And the reality is, who cares if the filing is done? I could take that entire pile of stuff and pitch it in the trash right now, today, and nobody would ever notice or care. Except maybe me when it came time to do my taxes and I didn’t have any receipts.

I just wrote a long ramble about things that pile up and then deleted it because it was possibly the most boring thing I have ever written. That’s a tough bar to reach, frankly, because I have written some boring stuff in my day. I used to write press releases and while one tries, of course, to make every word scintillating, a press release is only interesting if you have some intrinsic reason to care about the topic. For most people, they’re barely skimmable. My thoughts on dog hair (as a substance that really piles up amazingly) were about the same. But writing a blog post is my current justification for not returning to that pile of filing.

In my other writing, I seem to have gone colon and semi-colon crazy lately. I’m blaming Uprooted — I noticed on my third reading that Naomi Novik was quite profligate with her punctuation and it did not in any way impair my reading enjoyment, so I guess maybe it rubbed off. My run-on sentences are all my own fault, though.

*sigh. This is the kind of post that involves much staring into space and the eventual realization that I’m just procrastinating. There are so many useful things that I need to be doing — laundry and dog walking and yes, filing — that I might as well get on with them. But I think I need to reward myself. No food rewards and nothing healthy pretending to be a reward … Ah, I know. But I need help!

What movie/television show, preferably on Netflix or Amazon Prime, should I watch as deserved entertainment when I finish the filing?