Also, I made myself a little Excel spreadsheet that tells me how fast I need to be writing to finish Carnival on deadline. It’s reassuring. It reassures me that if I completely ignore the book until July 31st, I only have to write 80,000 words overnight, and I can still be on time.
I love Matociquala.
Happy Beltane!
Not turning on my computer for four days running is a very good method of dealing with stress. I like it. It does, however, mean that I have a bunch of stuff to catch up on when I get back to it. The good thing is that it was over the weekend, when there’s generally less stuff to handle anyway.
Let’s see. My parents were in town for a conference, so they came over Friday night and I cooked a belated birthday dinner for my Dad. Roast breast of duck glazed in ginger marmalade and soy sauce, wild rice with oyster mushrooms and toasted almonds, organic spring greens salad with homemade vinaigrette, followed by a dessert of chocolate sponge sandwiched together with strawberry coulis folded into whipped cream, then topped with fresh strawberries and chocolate ganache. And my parents brought an excellent Australian shiraz called [yellowtail] and it was the perfect accompaniment. It was so incredibly perfect. I’m not sure what happened, but it all worked. I’m always surprised when special dinners work.
Band practice was very okay. We miss our drummer something fierce when she’s not there. We talked about what to drop for the upcoming private gig (we’re playing a wedding! okay, it’s the guitarist’s wedding, but still!) and ran through stuff. I think most of us feel better about the gig in general after a week of distance.
Liam’s naps and sleeping-through-the-night went out the window again. Saturday was very, very bad. Last night he only woke up once around midnight, and today when he woke up after a scant twenty minutes of nap he was soothed back to sleep, so I am cautiously optimistic. We thought a tooth had made its appearance Saturday morning, but it’s still covered by a thin bit of skin, damn it. Like the other three, now.
We had coven yesterday and wove a beautiful Maypole. We slipped the weave off and tied it into sections and everyone took a bit home. Our feast was really good, too.
I’ve been going to bed very early to cope with the sleep fragmentation I’ve been suffering courtesy of the waking baby. It seems to be helping a bit.
Reading an excess of Connie Willis (not that there really is such a thing) makes me want to write desperately again.
Okay, baby’s awake! That makes for a total of over an hour of nap this morning. Hurrah!
And in the interests of allowing the door to hit the inner critic firmly on its way out, I wrote a short story this afternoon.
It was meant to be a joke, but when Megan came home and told me that she’d bought a harpsichord I realized that she’d missed the punch line.
“Megan,†I said, “we don’t have anywhere to put a harpsichord.â€
“I know,†she said, her cheeks flushed from her walk up the hill. “That’s why I also stopped by the realtor’s office and asked her to go through her listings and come up with a half dozen houses for us to view next week.â€
It’s 793 words long; I was aiming for 750. Not bad. And I can probably tighten it to lose the forty-three extra words. But not now, because we have to go pick Liam up and give Devon her birthday present. And only now do I remember that I’d set aside this afternoon to read and critique someone else’s work, which I completely forgot about in the throes of “I know I’ll write a story serves you right stupid inner critic”. Gah. Maybe tonight, then.
It occurred to me on the way home from dropping Liam off to play with his Auntie Pasley that my inner critic has been taking over my brain for the past three weeks. It’s been scraping away at my spirituality (why do I bother?), my writing (I have a book coming out in a month, so of course now I’m waking up at night desperately wishing I’d left something out, or included something else, or said something differently), and my music (I’ve been tame in how I’ve expressed myself here over the past few days to protect audience and fellow bandmates from my self-loathing). I’m surprised it hasn’t told me that I’m a bad mother yet, because Liam’s not napping as long as he should and waking up at night.
But you know what? My inner critic can go take a long walk off a short pier.
We now return me to my regular scheduled programming. I’m passably good at some of what I do, really good at most of it, and I enjoy myself. So my inner critic can just go hang out with the bottom feeders in the cold murky muddy depths of the seaway.
Some ideas you have to coax to your hand like luring birds down from the sky to take food from your palm.
There are no rules; there is only what works.
~ Matociquala hits it dead on yet again.
(And also thought-provokes here with the discussion topic, “Words are a tool for injecting the story into the reader’s brain.” In the comments she says, “The art of writing fiction is the art of seducing the reader into generating a story that the reader finds satisfying.” A comment like that can make you look at the craft in a totally different way.)
I so desperately miss writing. Writing as my day job, I mean. Having a notebook next to the bed so I can jot things down as I fall asleep isn’t the same. I miss growing a story, I miss taking an idea and developing it through a chapter of NF, I miss being ambushed by a scene or story that has to be written right now, and I miss the feeling of being drained but happy with the number of words I set down during a work session. I even miss growling about how badly the writing’s going, because even then there’s some writing of substance happening. And I even miss this.
And before anyone helpfully hops in with ideas, please understand that I’m not in need of solutions to give myself writing time. My life is different right now, and I understand that; I knew what I was signing up for when I had the baby. I’m glad to have this journal in which to record thoughts and comments and the daily swing of things; that’s my writing right now. I’m just nostalgic for the huge part of my life that writing fiction and non-fic for publication used to occupy.
We had to take Liam’s mobile down yesterday because he’s perfected standing up in the crib. It’s got a funky bend in it that turns it into a base-with-light-and-music-mobile thing, though, so we’ve got it standing on his dresser now like a lamp.
It was nice to go to bed last night with part of the day and my mood salvaged. We finally got most of the coven together to make the coven incense, and it’s divine. The whole house smells fantastic. This is the project we began at Imbolc, pinpointing the three main things our coven works for (protection, healing, and spiritual growth) and then brainstorming ingredients to reflect those things. We tested them one by one to sense energy and scent, and blended three trial batches with slight variations for everyone to test at home on their own and report back. In the end we have thirteen components plus our signature ingredient (real maple syrup!), and last night they all blended beautifully. It went a long way towards soothing the badness of the day away. That’s a sign of success, in my opinion. If the energy released by burning this incense (or simply smelling the mix!) grounds while simultaneously uplifting the spirit, then it’s accomplished a lot of its goal. Now I just need to use it in ritual to get a sense of how it functions there.