Wed. Sept. 24, 2025: Playing With Words

image courtesy of narciso1 via pixabay.com

Wednesday, September 24, 2025

Waxing moon

Pluto, Neptune, Saturn, Chiron, Uranus Retrograde

Cloudy and warm

Hitting midweek always feels like a surprise, for some reason. A welcome one, but still a surprise.

I was so disappointed at the lack of Rapture yesterday. I’d hoped plenty of the self-righteous, hypocritical, and cruel would be sucked up, and we wouldn’t have to deal with them anymore.

After a noisy start with the Sidewalk Chewing Demons, things calmed down for a few hours, so I dug into the work. It was difficult to settle, especially since I felt the weight of “have tos” over me. But I’ve learned that I need to do the most creative of the work early, BEFORE the “have tos” or else it throws off the whole day. That’s one reason I get up early, and one reason, when I’m in studio, I aim to hit the studio by 6 AM. Early morning hours are my best creatively, and that needs to be saved for my own work.

And yet, when I’ve had a few unsettled days (or, in this case, weeks), it’s often hard to settle back into that.

But I got some work done on the anthology story. I decided that, instead of the close third in which I started it, it made more sense to write it in first, and that made a big difference. I now have the wry, slightly caustic comic voice I need for it, and my protagonist and her life is surprising me in fun ways, because I’m letting my subconscious run free.

Of course, as soon as I really started getting into the story, the damn Sidewalk Chewing Demons returned, making noise. But I dug in, although at the noisiest points, I did admin work that didn’t require too much brain power.

I didn’t get done as much work as I hoped on the story, but I’m happy with the quality of what was actually done. I see a reasonably clear path through the story. And I had my trusty notebook from the early morning writing sessions open next to me, so I could refer to the notes I made for it over the past few days, which helped a lot.

The way the Sidewalk Chewing Demons upped the noise EVERY time I started to dig back into the story was annoying. No, I don’t think it’s intentional. I’m not that important and they’re not that smart. It’s just negative synchronicity (if there’s such a thing).

Dealt with a bunch of admin. Packed some of my project bags for the residency. I got my notes back from the ghostwriting client – 20K to get to them before I go in-studio next week. 6 business days instead of the usual 10, so I’ll work through the weekend, which gives me 8. There may well be a late-nighter at some point late this week or early next week. I am getting too damn old for all nighters! I’ll go through all the notes a few times before I get started, so I don’t make changes that then are negated by other notes further down. It will all work.

I read two scripts for next week’s WAM meeting. I have only two more to read.

I wrote my first ever tyburn poem. That’s a 6-line poem. The first four lines are two syllables each, and the final two lines are 9 syllables each. It was a lot of fun. Although the description I first found didn’t mention that the first 4 lines have to rhyme and the last two lines have to rhyme, so I need to go back and work the poem some more! I mean, I was going to work it anyway, I only wrote the first draft, but now I really need to do that!

Yoga was wonderful. One yogi brought her service dog, who loves yoga and loves all of us. He did the round of the room, tapping people with his paw to get petted, since, you know, we were just lying there. He’s such a love bug. Much harder to ignore a 70-pound golden retriever who wants to be petted than a little cat like Bea! But the logic was the same: You’re just sitting/lying there, you might as well pet me. Tap, tap, tap, lick, lick, lick until you do.

Home, dinner, read a bit of Gail Godwin’s journal from the 1960’s. Another book I own, but is in storage, so I ordered it from the library.

Slept well. Woke up at midnight because it was raining – finally! It didn’t rain enough, though. The ground soaked it all up quickly. We need more. It’s dreary, gray, and heavy this morning, so we might well get more, and I hope we do.

During my morning yoga, I was in downward-facing dog and Tessa came up underneath me to lick my nose. Cats!

The bulk of the 15-minute writing session was background for the anthology story, which was a lot of fun. Now I have details I can pull and integrate as wanted/needed.

The main focus this morning will be the anthology story. The focus this afternoon is the ghostwriting. That’s all I’m putting into my “have to” column today. I will see how the rest of the day unfolds, instead of overloading myself, and then feeling guilty when it doesn’t all get done.

Have a good one!