I had a fantastic day yesterday. That’s about it. Four hours of playing in the store, dinner with Ceri, a smash-bang-wow workshop, a request for a private workshop for a group on the South Shore, then drinks with friends.

On the way to the pub we stopped in at Renaud Bray and I picked up those inks, because I was paid for my full-time work last week and for last night’s workshop (private instruction is so much more lucrative than retail!) and I thought that I deserved a little treat for surviving the past two lean weeks. I now have those darling little oval pots of cuivre, marron, and spring green. Yay! We got home last night and the first thing I did was get out my dip pen, sit on the floor and make lines all over a sheet of blank parchment paper to see what it looked like. I’ll be paying Hydro off in full later today with a chunk of my earnings, but before that, the inks were a lovely little gift to myself. (Note to self: ink (both black and colour) for the printer would probably help too.)

Over dinner last night Ceri gave me her latest pages of creative effort, and for the first time since we began doing this exchange of writing in July, I had nothing to give her. I felt guilty when I left the flat yesterday morning, but then I told myself that I really didn’t have to feel that way since I had given her seventy-eight (!) pages of the Great Canadian Novel over the past three months. I did try to write earlier this week, honestly I did; but I opened the laptop, made a couple of corrections as I re-read the eleven pages of the latest section, and then stared at the screen for about twenty minutes. I’m stuck. Normally when I’m stuck, I jump to the next scene and then go back and fill in the necessary space with an event of some sort, but the next scene I had planned was Christmas shopping, and the characters were still only in mid-November with no way to get to early December. So when I shared that frustration with Ceri yesterday, she said, without missing a beat, “Make it snow,” which was absolutely brilliant and I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of it. Another of Ceri’s super-powers, by the way, is being a Muse for people. She gives them great ideas. She occasionally laments that alas, she doesn’t inspire herself in the same fashion, so I can only hope that our writing arrangement covers at least the deadline sort of inspiration that writers need. I did give her a nifty idea for her husband’s Hallowe’en costume, but I doubt it even comes close to repaying the Muse-debt that society has incurred to her.

I’m terribly looking forward to driving up to see my parents next weekend; I haven’t seen them since July, and we haven’t made the drive to Oakville in this new car yet. After its spectacular performance through New York and Pennsylvania, this five-hour spin should be a dream! Seven days to go!