I Try Not to Say Things Like This ...

... but heck, I earned the prerogative, what with being a barren old maid and all.

One of the nice things about having kids is that, right now, I am contemplating going to bed within half an hour or so, and just staying in bed until noon tomorrow.  The commitments on my weekend are all mine, deliverable and answerable only to me - and I can change them any time I want.

Oh sure, fifteen or so hours snuggled with a pillow is not *really* going to happen.  I'm not a total degenerate.  (Just mostly.)

But still, I can sleep in pretty prodigiously without interruption.  Lolly likes her sleep, too!  She makes an awfully good housemate sometimes ...

Parts of Me

When I was a little kid, I had this thing with my closet.  My room was my apartment, and the closet was my bedroom; my white dresser, made of actual wood, and decorated with scrollwork and brass fittings, was a retired piece of dorm furniture from my dad's university, and that was about it for my kitchen.  The main point in this construct, this idea that I had a home of my own, was the closet, though.  In summertime, I used the front porch (my two windows opened onto the front porch, and I used those for egress; who needs doors?).  But the closet was the place.

I read in there a lot.  I kept it "arranged", in some way which satisfied whatever my juvenile needs or dreams were.  Space wasn't prescriptive to me, back then (my little wall shelves were Barbie's apartment, often).

There's a photo of my feet, sticking out of an appliance box; the ultimate, beloved nest - my brother and I loved big boxes (who doesn't???) when we were kids.

When I turned ten, mom and dad gave me a beanbag chair for my birthday, and I nearly imploded with joy at the extravagance.  I still remember getting up for my Cheerios, and finding this green thing in my bowl - a newspaper print picture of a neon green beanbag.  There must have been screaming.  I was a big screamer.

That chair went with me EVERYWHERE.  It was a fixture in the closet, it got hot and the vinyl would be soft and heated out on the front porch, it moulded into the rocking chair of my grandmother's I still love sitting in today, quietly creaking and perhaps quietly thinking, or simply being.  It piled onto the couch, into appliance boxes.  It lived in the closet an awful lot - but that was not because it was "put away".  The thing was my next.  I could cuddle up in my beanbag, the green and gold afghan my grandma made (the first one she ever made; the one I still have, so soft, much-beloved, and still bright), perhaps buried over even my head, sitting and reading.

I was into novels by the time the beanbag came along, and had that thing almost through graduation (it died in a hideous cat-marking indident ... I can still remember the sight of that bright-green, polluted thing in the dumpster beside my sleeply little apartment, too ... sad sigh).  I went through my "B.C." comics compilations in that chair.  I went through Mad Magazine paperback comps too.  I entered the "grownup" reading years devouring my mom's Jean Plaidy, Victoria Holt, and even at least one spy novel of dad's.  I pulled stuff off our shelves - Art Buchwald, of all things, or the acres of beautiful anthologies we owned, short stories by the mile.  Poe and Hawthorne, limericks by Bennet Cerf.  I was as scattershot then, I think, as I am now in my entertainments.

And always ensconced in screaming-green, smooshy, gooshy, beanbag vinyl.  I used to like to unzip its bottom, unzip its mesh liner, and stick my hands in the countless, tiny, soft little styrofoam "beans".  Attached as I allow myself to be to the artifacts of life, that big chunk of my childhood and teen-dom still makes me sad, when I think how it went.  My mom actually bought me a red one at some point, many years later, when I could no longer fit anything like that into my life.  It stayed in my basement a little while, and I gave it away at some point.  I understood what she was doing.  But you can't recapture some things.  Even IF I probably would still have had that green one around in some corner if the thing had survived my college years.

That beanbag, my Barbie cottage - the scent of new vinyl still smells like Christmas joy to me.  Heh.

Buchwald and "B.C." ... Doonesbury and Mary Stewart ... my first taste of Kristin Lavransdatter, and my last gasps with picture books and Golden Books too ...

I was a weirdo, a closet-dwelling little shy, backward kid.  This is still the main makeup of my personality, and in my self-image, this aspect utterly dominates.  Little brown-haired girl.

I had a good childhood.

Much as I hated it in the making.

Writerliness

Okay, Arianna Huffington on Colbert says "The Huffington Post is not about Right versus Left, it is about Right versus WRONG ..."

Oh, honey.

And I read HuffPo from time to time.



But THAT.  Is writerliness.  And this finally gets me off my bum to write that Writerly post I've been thinking and saying I was going to get to soon.


***


Okay.

Writerly writing goes past self-consciousness and ends up in self-satisfaction instead, skewing either twee or superior depending upon its point.  And it always has a point, which itself is tiresome.

More often than not, the latter seasons of M*A*S*H represent for me the sins of writerliness - the didactic sentimentality, the heavily over-ground axes - but it is popular even in journalism.  In fiction, it can get pretty thick.  Fiction peopled with auto-characters, avatars for an author's self (or dreams of self) modeled into *ary *ues, cheap exposition working to be clever, would-be clever verbiage straining to teach.

The writerly writer can be heard finding their own work witty and charming.  On television, Sorkin productions sometimes fluff a writerly writer.  Sitcoms of course do it, see the old war horse referenced above.  In the seventies, before irony, archness, and meta came along (we did not know of these concepts of course, the human race before Teh Intarwebs), earnestness was done to a scale which might appear ostentatious to the wiser eyes of today.  (Is Diane being writerly?  The world may never know.  But as Mr. X knows, I was never suBtle.)

Cleverness and sincerity had a dangerously passionate relationship, and of course audiences had no critical eye for it.  This stuff was ENT-ertaiment!  (*Cue Lovitz doing his Thespian character.)  Even the quiet writerly moment - *especially* the quiet writerly moment - was thick with portent.  "Portent!" these moments cried, with their contrived intensity.  "Portent ..." they whispered, with the profundity of Lesson.

Ahh.  Writerly writing.

It's hardly gone the way of the dodo, since all us hayseed pre-'netters grew up and got iPhones.  Even reality TV occasionally falls prey to writerliness, don't kid yourself.  And reality serves us up intimate, powerful personal monologues by the multi-ton.  Purported human beings sell their lives to the highest bidder so they can touch people - and get touched - and let's not pretend this stuff isn't scripted.

Still, for me, the worst writerliness is the CLEVER writerly moment - the scene in "Sports Night" where the implied emotional payoff is pride in condescension, when an inconceivably wealthy white dude offers a sandwich to a homeless person ... and the older guy *cuts it in half* because sharing is so cool and so deep, man, and we're all just the same, even though one dude is going home to his posh bachelor pad in half an hour.  Hey, but he was HUNGRY - and the homeless guy was hungry - and we're all just in this together, man.

I resent these things most when I let them affect me, which is perhaps why I am suspicious of emotionalism in my own writing.

That - or ... Ax, at any rate, happens to be first-person male, and I'm steeled to the teeth for all the XY-chromosome-sporting Guitarists who're just sneering in wait for me to "fail" writing my character.  And guys have no hearts, or whatever the stupid cliche' (err, common wisdom) is.  Ahm.

But sometimes, writerly writing DOES work, mechanically.  It's egregious and overheated, but damn if the tricks aren't effective, even when you see them for what they are.  Good writers can be writerly - and those buggers can be lethal when you are having a good week's PMS.

But effective or no, I still speak out against the onanistic (that's writerly speak for Jillin' off, kids) and controlling will of the writerLYer.  I play Guitarist to their performances, I scoff and snub and pretend I'm superior.

Don't be a writerly writer.

ESPECIALLY if it is "what you know".  Writing what you know is almost odoriferously overrated.

And that whole, profoundly overacted, breathily delivered right/left/right/wrong thing above is SUPER writerly.  Don't be That Writer.  That dude is a tool (even if the dude's a woman).

In the "This Never Happens" Department ...

There actually was a markedly attractive guy at RavenCon this weekend.  All things considered, it's probably wrong of me to find a guy with a mohawk appealing, but the smile on this one is the most arresting physical charm I have seen in years.

(Edited to add:  hah!  And his geek cred is probably better than mine too.)

Aftermowth

Hootenanny on a Friday night at my house:  achingly HOT bath, followed by analgesics, muscle relaxant, heating pad, and early bedtime.

Definitely Intentional

Okay, the cheese and badness is *clearly* intentional here.  At a police station, Zane complains that a woman forced him to have sex with her, blackmailed him, and tried to kill him - and the officer on duty says, "Was it forcible entry?"  All right, I am loving this.  This is how trash entertainment is supposed to work.

"What makes you think she's not dangerous - because she's beautiful?"  says Desperate, Disheveled Billy Zane.  "That is some real TWISTED reverse discrimination you've got going there."  And his performance is really working perfectly.  Aww, Billy.  Too much fun, boyo.

I still wish that show you had with Clancy Brown (j'adore Clancy Brown!!!!) a couple years ago had survived.  If only for the fabulous hair and baldness (seriously - even as a woman who loves long haired men - so much better than today's wig).  And Clancy Brown, whom I have dearly loved for such a hugely long time now (go, Urbanna, OH!), and Billy Zane, winning ever more points with this let-it-all-hang-out-ness and his wonderful villainy in that show.

To reiterate:  Blue Seduction.  Too much fun, boyo.

Also:  the women look like actual, human, beautiful women.  HUGE points on the casting director.



**Ed. note:  this post marked 80s Bimbastic Glory, because Zane plays a HUGE 80s bimbo indeed**

Masculine/Feminine

The Ax and the Vase is a book of men, focused on masculinity, monarchy, and the Church.  The work in progress (still obstinately untitled) moves into another world - and, while the focus remains similar, the characters do affect the particulars.  We're in a more southern clime now, and moving less among the men.

This gives me the opportunity to indulge the scholarly side of what appear to be my more "traditionally feminine" interests.  I can study the history of perfume, and revel in the details of costume and cosmetics.

This comes not in service of tarting up an empty story, but in adding depth to aspects of storytelling I consciously did not give full rein in A&V.  Clovis tells his story himself - and, because of that, I felt that certain specifics (touching the detail regarding the appearance of the characters - including himself - and more fanciful descriptions of feeling, or omnipotent observations) would be a bit precious.  His character is not introspective, and it can hardly be expected of a "Barbarian" prince that he would expend consideration on fine points of this type.  So they are less in evidence in that novel.

The shift is not merely from the focus on masculine characters, but also a transition from first person point of view to an omnipotent voice.  Telling the story from the point of view of a single character is not limiting as such, but does prevent an author from poking around in other minds, or contemplating the corners of rooms in which he is not actually standing.

And so my new researches will spoil the theater major in me with the opportunity to look at textiles and kohl pots, coiffure and headdress, etiquette and protocol.

I call this a shift into the feminine, but let it hardly be thought that I am devolving into characters obsessed with pink and ruffles.  For one, even the most cursory education in the history of costume will teach anyone that pink, in its association with modern, facile notions of vacuous femininity.  For two, my joy in this work is that I will be able to present full-bodied women in my work, authentically constrained within the world women occupied for all the millennia before my own privileged life was given to me - and yet exerting the remarkable nature of human autonomy, in all the ways we find to express it between and beneath the limits we impose on each other.

Femininity may indeed allow me to focus on "girlie" things.  I promise, though:  it won't prevent my writing actual characters ...

Lost and Not Lost

The internet is an amazing tool for obliterating the barrier between ourselves and the past.  It's rather a terrifying one for obliterating barriers between people (there are friends and others from my youth it took me many years to manage to lose touch with, and it is a little daunting to realize just how easy it is for that effort to go for naught, these days), for creating personal and financial vulnerability, for learning things it once might have been impossible to ever find.  For reunion with memories long past.

I did something this past week which represents both something I find kind of mystifyingly wonderful, and which also in a way goes against (some of) my beliefs.


I saw a photo of a weir the other day, and was brought to mind of the source from which I learned the word.  It was a book about a British boy, coming of age, and growing in friendship and attachment to an elusive girl he saw when exploring a weir out in the country.  The book was called The Otherwise Girl - something I'm pretty sure I bought at a library booksale when I was twelve or so - and one of those books I read at an age, and IN an age, when reading could still be so intimate and so singular an experience that it felt nobody else in the world could have ever known the story.

Reading was not, in the 1970s, especially for kids, really a blockbuster experience.  YA lit was backwater stuff, not the driving force in the publishing market it is today.  Until I discovered "Are You There, God, It's Me, Margaret" and S. E. Hinton, I was unaware of anything I had ever read (other than the Bible) which had ever been read by anyone else.  And so books, for me, were an extraordinarily personal adventure.  Every story I had ever read was, for me, precisely and wholly my own object and memory.  I still write as if, all marketing notwithstanding, my work is unheard and unseen, existing only for one reader - for myself - or for some imagined fourteen-year-old-boy staying for a summer at his great aunt's, who discovers this dusty old thing on a bookshelf and reads it, and somehow loves it.

What I mean to say with all this is that  The Otherwise Girl  represents something of a personal genre, a story only I have ever known, and which, because I lost it decades since, was one of the beautiful ephemera of the universe.  In some way, that enhances its strength and its appeals, its soft lines and gentle lessons, its eerie loveliness.  Its absence, like that of my youth itself, is a part of what underscores its place in my heart ...

The Otherwise Girl is, of course, not the only story of its kind for me.  The Underside of the Leaf is another.  A seamier tale.  A memory of reading something, still back in grade school - I must have been about eleven - which seemed shocking and almost forbidden.  These coming of age stories came when I was very young - before the modernity of Judy Blume, or the edgy sixties-hip of Hinton's Outsiders.  They came before I even aspired to literary sophistication, when I was very much a little kid.  They came to me utterly innocent, and told me tales both of sweetness and of tasted sorrow.  I recall, from Leaf, the intensity of feeling I had about a girl liking a boy who somewhat frightened her.  I recall a description of his sweater.

It's never occurred to me to attempt to recapture these fragments, the flotsam of a childhood I bless but am content to know has been decades-since left behind.


***


And yet.

This past week, I ordered copies of both these books.  The picture of the weir did it - and got me looking, too, at Madeleine L'Engle too (great books, and fantastic, gripping titles).  I went to Amazon to buy the Book of Common Prayer I've had on my list for a bit now - and ended up coming away with these two, too.

Otherwise has arrived already.  It is the same edition I had then; a blue upon blue turquoise cover.  A girl in shorts.  A ghostly reverse image.


I wonder whether generations since my own will ever even have the opportunity for loss like this, the kind of progress through life that shapes my own entire existence, the kind of irretrievability which overrides free will and exerts itself merely by dint of time.  Life isn't the quiet backwater it once was, and I wonder what the experience will mean for my nieces - for the marvelousness that is nostalgia, the beauty of sentiment, with its ghost of melancholy making it such a beautiful feeling.

I try not to feel generationally superior - that These Kids Today have lost the very experience of loss.

But I do wonder.  Ephemerality is at the core of life's urgency and emotionality.  Being able to order up one's own preadolescence for home delivery is both wonderful ... and itself almost wistful.  I won't recapture the girl I was thirty and more years back.

And yet.

I never lost her, either.  She's still such a part of the woman I am day to day.  And if I didn't bless the fact I could give her a little nibble - could find these memories at all - I would not have placed that order.

I believe in the impenetrability of lost youth.  But I also believe in the joyousness of memory.  And reading.

Excuses? Excuses!!

I've been thinking, since the Conference, about what should get my focus right now. My instinct is to put the most effort into revisions, to put out a couple more key queries I feel are time sensitive (incuding to meet with Jason Allen Ashlock, when his generosity is matched by his availability) - but to largely curtail the querying process. It's an easy cop-out, of course - but there are a couple of logical points almost demanding the shift in effort.

For one thing, the fact that the manuscript will be in a state of flux for some time means: I no longer have a "finished product" I want to present. Because the revisions I want to do, I don't want to do "only" for this one agent. The feedback is too good to start versioning now. In any case, if I'm committed to The Ax and the Vase, I need to be committed to it as a whole object - not as one thing to one agent and another to another. Versioning is an unnecessary pain in the behind, in any case; who'd want to get involved in that?

As much to the practical point as that: querying right now, while advertising all over my blog and the SBC's, only tells agents - 'hey there, hi there; I'm moist about somebody else right now, but if you're interested, maybe I'll throw you a draft of what I'm shilling ...'

Um. Yeah, no.

As much as anything, and still valid I feel, is the simple fact of life that thre's only so much you can do and expect to manage any of it well. For that matter, there's only so much you WANT to do, barring a martyr complex, really. And I have no martyr complex - so ... not so much.

I spend a minimum of 40 hours a week working on administrative projects, and writing - at least, selling one's writing - is another one. It's not minor, and after the 80% of my working life spent on days dawning at six a.m. and working until almost six, the importance anything must obtain after hours like this to demand and compel further effort out of me is fundamental. Sure, I have half-day Fridays, and there are the weekends: but if you restrict authorial effort to two and a half days a week (or less, if you actually use those days for anything OTHER than the work of writing), you're shortchanging your work, most likely.

So here we are: I will have to backburner querying for some finite period. The revisions offer both the opportunity to shift focus temporarily - AND, for goondess sakes, to get back to *creative* work, which hasn't been extensive with everything going on. What a pleasure - and what a concept, for a writer!

So. The focus shifts - and the work suspends, so other work can be done. Dissenting opinion is welcome; I sort of seek perspectives here, if anyone has one. But this is my instinct. We'll see how it works!

Bookish Enough

Reading as much as I have, since starting with JRW and the first, misty chapters of Ax, about and by writers and about writing and reading, I have felt for a long time that I am not bookish enough.  I'm a good writer, but I don't seem to have a singlemindedness about either my authorship nor the artifacts-of-life (I also considered some clever use of "artifactual" here) as they pertain to books and quantity of reading.  It's not like I'm wielding a measuring stick here, but it does feel sometimes as if "everyone else does more" ... reads more, owns more books - somehow is "more" entitled to being a writer, by dint of being a reader, than I am.  My boss made a Stendahl reference not long ago, and I was afraid to admit:  I'm not what you'd call well-versed there.  Neither in French lit, nor even in a lot of classics, whatever the nationality.  I tend to be a VERY eclectic reader.  There is a heavy biblical underpinning, of course - I can still get lost in there very easily - and I have read a respectable segment of standard-issue schoolin' lit and also some off-the-path Victoriana and other eras, though I am likely too weak in 20th century standards, and those I have gone at I have refused to remember like a good student.

It all goes back to my contrarianism.  But it also goes to the fact that I simply disbelieve in prescriptivism.  Least of all, for READING - an act which, for me, whorish as it may sound to so many, is not for me a participation in The Arts, but the engagement in entertainment.  Agents who make lists of books one "must" have read - or who name authors one "must" know (and the one who named "Slaugherhouse Five" as perhaps the best book in all history) - to me miss the point of reading, which is ENJOYMENT.  Storytelling is an art, to be sure - but by my lights, it is first and foremost *entertainment*.  This doesn't negate its deeper potential - nor even thematics, spiritual uplift, all the fancy Things and Stuff - but it is, for me, the guiding force.  I am simultaneously intimidated by and disgusted by those who would dismiss another reader for following an insufficient path of literature.  Of all insane arrogance - only stuff popular enough to have become "classic" - or culturally "relevant" enough (to a limited population of the world) to be widely disseminated - is worthy of consideration ...

... and - by far worse - should be made compulsory??


Not even if it did make me bookish enough would I follow that particular tenet.  The path is not primrose-colored enough to stain my tootsies on.


***


But this post was not intended to be about contrarianism and prescriptivism in personal reading catalogues.  It was actually meant to start on a musing about my home.

Thinking about this defensiveness - that I'm not "enough" of a reader; that I don't have all the right cred, to be a real writer - I was sitting in my living room this weekend, and realizing how truly surrounded I am with books.

Walking into my home, nobody would be struck by the predominance of a traditional "library" atmosphere.  Yet everywhere around me, such a variety of books, all ove the place.  By the front door, on the small table, are some in-progress reads - a Mary Stewart (The Crystal Cave), and a Penman on tap - the bibles, and a Tanakh.  At the other end of the couch, stacked on the small red slate table - the anthologies I picked up at the antique store this weekend, the books I bought at Orca, the first edition of "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" my mom gave me for my birthday (*love!*), The Chronicles of the Tombs (which I cannot recommend highly enough for historians, Victorian curiosity lovers, or people who just dig inscriptions and epitaphs), and several gifts from my brother and family.

In the office, the bookshelves my father built for his and mom's Dream Home twenty-seven years ago are lined two-deep, stacked on top with an antique six-volume history of Virginia, and all my reasearch for Ax lies in there, some of it sidewise on top of lit mags, yearbooks, and at least two dissertations (not mine).  The Will and Ariel Durant volumes are on the small record rack he built.  All my college milk-crates (dressed up, now, with a runner from grandma's house) house ancient journals I really need to burn, and the Texas Instruments calculator (Still in box) dad left behind - and on top of those is another set of miscellany, including books from my childhood, some more gifts from my brother and family, and at least two more yard sale finds.

Still farther across the living room, the complete Agatha Christie (same yard sale, if I remember) and "50 Great Ghost Stories" - still with the bookmark I used in it growing up.  Top that off with a NFS copy of "The Messiah" and "Under the Banner of Heaven" and the votive holders have a nice pile to sit on.

And then there is the bookshelf.  The one I built WITH my dad.  The one where I learned how to use the router.  The one with the "show" books - ones I grew up with - coffee table ones (I haven't even mentioned my actually-on-the-coffee-table coffee table books) - museum souvenir books, college texts including the one my dad gave me when he was a test reader for it "Physics for People Who Think They Don't Like Physics", Tao of Pooh and Piglet too, my Adamses, and a Tutankhamon I remember from grandma's as a child ...  Photo books, art books, design books, even a Vogue drawing volume - and all the religion and philosophy I saved from college days ...  The ancient, delicate, tiny "Sonnets From the Portugese" ... the Cicero text dad read before he died ... and every photo album I have compiled in my life ...

If these aren't enough for anyone's measure of a reader - or of a writer - I don't need to work with them, and will be content with their rejections.  For me, though, they are beautiful.  Pieces of my life.

Ohh, My Beloved Ice Cream Bar

It is raining at last.  I suspect it will *not* "last" - but it is beautiful, for the moment.  Yesterday, like so much of the country, it was over 100.  I ran errands on the way home from work.  Grocery store.  Fabric store.  Gas.  7-Eleven ... where I got a 40-ounce blue-flavored ("raspberry" and lemonade) Slurpee.  Drugstore.  Home.

By the time I got back here:  I was ready to commit to that Slurpee, love it, name it George, maybe retire to Florida with it.  I loved that Slurpee.

I may need to clone it and fall in love all over again tomorrow before the writing group comes over ...


Ahh, joy - on such a very hot day.

Mmm.

Juicy Drama

"Kings" may have been the most audacious series ever to air on television, and I ws fairly blown away by it while it was on.  I flagged, though, when it became clear the show would never (be allowed to?) last, and quit watching.  As much as I liked it; as fascinated as I was that it was ever mounted at all - I retreated in fear when I thought we would lose it, and I told myself I'd find it in my own time.

The entire thing is available on DVD for under thirty dollars, and it's on Netflix to boot.  If you are interested in the strangest soap opera since "Soap" itself - steeped in the Old Testament; filled with astounding, unusual dialogue (some of it exceptionally good, much of it beautifully-functionally declamatory ... no small portion rather badly read - even by a cast, annoying as some of them may be at times, still well chosen to their roles) ... a marvelous looking show, and a pretty amazing surprise, I would very much recommend it.

The thing is Dallas on whatever the Judeo-Christian version of a vision quest might be.  It's earnest beyond most contemporary stomachs, about G-d.  It's remarkably exploitive of Him, too.

But then ... the Old Testament itself rather was.  If we're honest.

But more than anything:  it is drama.  The most incredible, power-packed - crack-addled - drama.  Let's face it, the OT was that and then some, and we love it.



Dallas in "Gilboa" - a mythical, modern-looking kingdom, yet imbued with the most medieval aspects of an monarchy.  iPads and the finger of G-d ... salacious palace intrigue and portents and pronouncements from (Reverend) Samuel(s).

Ohhhhh ... but the drama.

My Lord, kids, this thing DARES.  It does things even J. R. might have never been scripted with.  And revels.  And excels.  This is perhaps the most astounding thing I've ever seen, not for the presence of G-d, the light casting shadows.

It's the things the camera dares to see in those shadows.  Holy cats, this is Grand Guignol.  This is unfettered.

Hell, it stars Ian McShane.  It has to be.

Every uber-angsty goth kid should be buying this.  Every drama or Bible nerd.  Everyone who ever loved Ann Baxter as Nefertiri in "The Ten Commandments" - but thought it was too understated and rife with verissimilitude.  All the addicts of those 1980s nighttime wealth-porn soaps.  (Because this is wealth-porn, every bit as much as all the rest of these things I am gushing about.)


It turns out, I missed some of the most amazing things.  I just bumped across an acre of wrinkles and reversals, only to find something enormous said to have taken place offscreen.

I'm interested to see how true that turns out to be.

I'm enjoying the ridiculousness - the SUMPTUOUS indulgence - rather immensely.  Bravo!

Alpha, Day, Omega

This morning, with the summons, I didn't have to report until 9:30. Since I'm usually at my office by 7:30, and the drive today would have been less than half as far, I had two hours to sleep in.

Of course, I slept rather poorly, but still it was pleasant to relax, at least.

It stayed dark in the house this morning. I was surprised when I woke at 7:30 to a clap of thunder, and it was not really light. The hail began very quickly; small and tinny-sounding hail, but there is no mistaking the sound.

Lolly came over, and I immediately invited her up on the bed. She doesn't get up with me very much at all anymore; perhaps a function of age. Perhaps partly owing to that blanket she loves so much ... or maybe she just feels safe, and prefers to protect *me* these days. But today she needed me, and was pleased to lie down with me on the bed. She had to settle a couple of times; ending up bum-to-my-belly, so her head was guarding the direction mine wasn't.

I don't have to do much soothing with Sidney anymore. When she and I were new, I often had to put conviction into her calming. "It will be okay, you are okay ..." But since we got new windows, since she grew to trust me, since she's just grown a bit older and less fearful, all she needs is a hand on her back somewhere.

And so I lay today, an arm flung up along her side, her belly under my wrist, my fingers on her ruff. It's a very fine thing to lie with a good dog, and feel her fearful cry-breaths turning into calm ones ... into rasping snores ... into peace ... into the sleep-sounds of dreams. She was gently bunny-kicking me in the soft spots, chasing rabbits in her oblivion. The warmth of her fur on the inside of my arm.

By the time it was time to actually get up (from 7:30 or so, we had a half an hour - and even then, getting up and getting ready were pretty leisurely paced), the rain had followed the hail, had died down itself, and the sky - no lighter - was at least emptier. When we walked, our heads, if not our feet, stayed dry.

By midday, it was bright and sunny, one of those days when "storm" becomes an unrecognizeable concept.

For a while.

Just after eight (regardless of what Blogger quasi-"thinks", it is now 8:49), the sound came in, and I went out. Sat on the back stoop in air grown cool again, and listened to the wind, the thunder. Huge swaths of the sky, just lighting up. The entire north, horizon-wide. Not as loud as the clap this morning. But, gently, inexorable.

I thought about the camellia I transplanted today (almost able to rip it out of the ground without a shovel). I never looked over at it, in the growing dark. I just looked up.

And now I sit, Siddy back up next to me. This time on the couch, up against me. Sitting up some, but more and more just lying against my leg. Warm, that fur. Sweetly stinky - it's been weeks now since she had that bath. And not trembling. Just needing me. As the day's omega storm moves southward ... and away, along with the day.

Stop-N-Sniff

Lolly and I are off today, so we had a nice leisurely walk of it this morning. It is fairly warm outside, the sun out but not overdoing it; a pleasing, soft February day. Spring starts making promises early around here, and this is one of those days it's hinting around, flirting. I spent last night fraught with dreams, so quiet has been the order of the morning so far.

Sid particularly loves wild onions. Today we had a browse, and she investigated all the dark green patches shooting up out of the low, mossy turf. I listened to the quiet sound of our footfalls, and she softly nuzzled up in all the rubbery green shoots of onions.

She likes a Stop-N-Sniff, does my girl. Not walking in any particular direction, given free leash to lead me a little, and all the time in the world to investigate the breaks in the evergreens, the shadowy damp underneath, the stories told by dogs gone by. More often than not we're on a mission; in the mornings, she doesn't get to do more than say hi to her friends and get her business done. In the evenings, she usually only gets to take her preferred detours on the second half of our walks. So a day off, and a good, short-but-SLOW stop-n-sniff is luxury for her. Hey, it's her thirteenth birthday today. She gets the sweet treatment she *always* deserves, in good helpings.

She also got some scraps of turkey for breakfast. Didn't mind a bit if it was still a little kinda-frozen. It's turkey! She's a dog! Lay it on me, says she. And so I did.

She's just thumped down next to me in the dim outline of her sunbeam. Her eyes are looking up at me. Beautiful, big old glossy things, those eyeballs. Almond shaped, clear, bright, and trusting. Her ears are up. If I am living well enough that my dog has her ears up, it is a good day.

And slowly, she begins to kind of sniff at, in preparation to relax upon, her elegant forepaws. The sun is gleam-shous on her. She uncertainly, then finally, relaxes. And all is well, for now, with the world.

Cure-ish-ative

Well now I *have* gotten some sleep. Sometimes, it's good to know my old ability to sleep whatever the circumstances remains intact. The headache has nothing to say about this rest, but it has been gotten, and the headache can't gainsay *that* at least. Now I'm bleary and slow, but that's not too bad. The afternoon is just giving way to dusk, and the dog is making sweet tired sounds at my feet. Light in the living room is softening; it is dim here now.

Not the worst day off.

Not the best headache.

I could cocoon on a day like this.

Oh, wait - I kind of did. Heh. If only X had been here to nestle into a day like this with me. That would have been perfect.

Not Resting

I need to be sleeping, but the caffeinne in that headache pill is keeping me from the possibility. I lay for a while trying to think lovely thoughts of X - of his being here on a day like this, the way we'd run errands, the way we'd sit and read at each other - but I am restless and unable to do right to myself.

The pills aren't working (on the pain) - but they are keeping me nattering. I "called in" on our writers' club meeting today, and can't seem to get down to un-business.

From my experience Saturday, going out when I knew my head was clanging with pain, I know at least I'm avoiding exacerbation. And the laptop is quiet, where turning on the TV would attack me - and reading a paper book would have me in glasses I have been fighting against for a week - but it isn't the brightest headache treatment. I know that. But it is so easy, so temptingly, time-wastingly present.

X tells me if he had headaches like the one I've been describing this week, he'd be grabbing a doctor by the lapels demanding relief.

I, of course, respond by abandoning my glasses, failing to lie down and rest, and pretending that a cocktail of acetaminaphen and ibuprofen, and leaving the TV off, are some sort of therapy. Meanwhile barfing out of my puling brain, knowing the result is drivel.

Hey, clearing the head of drivel must be good for what ails the brainpan. ... No ... ?

Ah well.

Time to try lying down again.

Then probably a stab at Chinese food, later. That might actually be a step up.

Lush Case

You know it's going to be an indulgent encounter with PMS when watching the final episode of "Dollhouse" leaves you fighting hard not to sob.

Heh.

Aww.