Goodbyes and Readings

So, the past week has been interesting.

Our flight to California leaves on Thursday morning, i.e. about 60 hours from now. All of our furniture and all of our stuff (including, unfortunately, my laptop charger) has been packed into boxes with miles and miles of gray paper and taped up and loaded onto a giant truck (tall enough to snap several low-hanging branches of the tree outside our house), and is tooling across our great and extremely wide nation at this very moment. Our cars have both been picked up, leaving us to drive my brother-in-law's car - and I have serious gratitude that the car is available to us, so we don't have to pay for a rental, but MAN. The thing has the turning radius of a yacht and smells weird enough to make me slightly carsick all the time.

Since Friday, all our big tasks have been wrapped up and finished. We're staying at Matt's parents' house, and they're away for the weekend. We've decided to treat the last few days as a vacation. We spent Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of last week packing and fraying our nerves, and I know exactly how much work awaits us when the boxes start getting opened, so a brief guilt-free vacation seems like a dandy idea. I've set aside my work for the time being, and we're hanging out on the breezy porch by the water and eating good food and spending gluttonous time with each other, around seeing friends whom we'll very much miss.

Last night we sat outside after dinner and took the air before bed. We were talking about our early memories when I looked at the dock and saw that, without us noticing, a blue heron had landed in the pool of light thrown by the lamp down there. It nicked its head back and forth, neck doubling and redoubling, the fingers of feathers on its breast ruffling in the light wind. As we watched, it stalked to one end of the dock, peered over the side, and did nothing for several long minutes. Then, in no hurry, it went to the other edge and gazed fixedly at the water lapping against the pilings for so long that we gave up and went inside before it caught anything. I thought about how fishermen would likely be inspired by this heron's patience, the way it looked and looked and looked at the water, waiting. And waiting. And waiting. I wondered if it had babies to feed.

I taught my last yoga class yesterday afternoon, and it was a sad thing. My brain hasn't quite gotten that I'm finished with my yoga responsibilities; I don't have the stamped FINISHED feeling that I usually have about something like this. Perhaps I'm thinking that on Thursday, instead of taking a flight, I'll just have to head in to the Odenton studio again in the evening and spend an hour making jokes with my regulars. That was a much sadder class to say goodbye to than either of the Ridgely classes, but few of my regulars showed for the Ridgely ones. (They always desert slow-paced classes when spring hits.)

I also read Guilty Pleasures, the first Anita Blake book, and read/skimmed a book called Under Wraps in the last week. I didn't really enjoy either one of them. But they definitely helped me garner some insight on the urban fantasy genre, and I kept the receipt for both, so, score. I still have plenty of material for the next few days and for the plane flights: Ganymede, Plague Town, Just Cause, and the two most recent Sookie books. I read last year's Sookie book...last year, but I don't remember it well enough to jump right in to this year's, and yes, I caved and bought the hardback. Guilty. I kept the receipt for that, too, but by the time I'm finished with both books, we'll be a few thousand miles away from that particular B&N.

The point of that paragraph was to say that, having read these two books, I now feel confident about discarding all the rules for my KUFC book. I could keep doing research and reading books for another six months, but that'd just be dawdling when I know what I'm going to do. I can't wait to get started. I'm sure that feeling will evaporate a few chapters in, but for now, golly gee, oh boy.

Oh! And I also read a romance novel this week. I haven't read any romance since I was about 12, but I read the query for this one and it hooked my interest as surely as it hooked Kristin Nelson's, so I ordered it from Amazon and sped the hell through it. It was awesome! I'm definitely reading more from this author. It was great fun to read something for which I had zero expectations and be pleasantly surprised by how witty it was. Huzzah for totally anachronistic historical romance! And sexy sex!

Phew

For the last couple of weeks, I've been waiting to start an at-home job, one which I hoped would solve several of our problems at once. But my start date was delayed, and then delayed again, and then delayed a third and fourth time. So I started to worry, like crazy, that in fact it wasn't going to work out, that I would have to return to the outside world and legal work. But I got some solid data about it yesterday: yes, I was actually hired; yes, the work does exist (even if it doesn't really exist this week). There is a big IT transition going on, which is the reason for all the delays, and that means that there might not be much to be paid for in the first couple of weeks. But it seems real enough, the job and my ability to do it. I think - I hope - that it's going to work out all right. There are things about it that aren't as...solution-oriented as I thought they would be, but I'm going to hope for the best. This is the third time this year that things have turned around at my blackest point of despair, and each time was accompanied by a spate of new ideas and greater hope for the future.

In other phew-related news, I did a complete read-through and first skinning of the novel. (It took me about seven hours, all told, which is not encouraging moving forward.) Oh, my dear Lord, what work I have to do. I have to rewrite and rework the whole opening, two or three chapters, and I suspect I'm going to end up adding another quarter of its length to the danged thing in new scenes and greater depth. But inconsistencies were helpfully apparent on this read, and I wrote them all down in the margins with my red pen, making notes on the backs of pages. Now it's on to write a detailed timeline and adjustment of ages, events, and spacing as needed. I also have to come up with a few more names and vocabulary, and start writing a sensible Luquenora glossary. I had suspected that I'd need to put an actual glossary in the back of the book, and yeah, on this read I determined that I do. Feels kind of like a failure, that I didn't make the language clear enough. Oh, well.

Yesterday I finished up editing a story I'd written and submitted it to a publication that's probably way over its head. (I made up my mind to reach for better publications in the future, to just grip writerly arrogance by the neck and continually presume I'm better than I am, so that eventually I'll become better. ...I think I'll write a whole post on this conflict another time.) The story was inspired by something in yoga class, as I mentioned a while back, but what's interesting to me is that the story in its finished form has no reference at all to its inspiration.

I was lying in savasana and the teacher came to give me a little thai-massage head-rub, and I used my neck muscles to "help him" lift my head. This is not helpful to the masseuse, as he needs you to be untense to give you a decent massage, and he whispered "Relax."

This gave me the idea for a story about a woman in this exact position whose reception of "Relax" was to remember a date-rapist whispering this to her as he did the deed. (Am I the cheeriest writer you know, or what?) After I thought through the story a few times, it became a man with this memory, and then I added some other elements and had a pretty good setup and conflict, I thought. I still had the yoga class in there as a framing device for the first few drafts, but when I came back to the story a few days later, it didn't fit. At all. Just cluttered up the raw experience of this poor character. I wanted to add more about him and his situation, but I wasn't writing a novel, just a little story, so all the fat got excised.

It's still really interesting to me that all elements relating to the inspiration for the story got tossed. I'm pleased with my results, but where it came from would be really convoluted, were I asked to explain.

I've been listening to Joanna Newsom almost exclusively for the last 24 hours, while I read and edited and worried over my new job. She has this strange ability to make you forget that there are other kinds of music than her own. Her music is so indubitably odd that you wouldn't think she'd have this quality. But it all seems so normal after a few spins, the harp, the voice, the symphonic construction, the appallingly poetic lyrics. What would you even need an electric guitar for?

"I took the blows..."

In my adult life, I've tended to believe that your birthday is the one day when everything is supposed to go your way. This has been a week (a month) where very little has gone the way I'd hoped, and it's a milestone birthday that I've been dreading for quite a lot of years now, so I didn't think much would be good about today. My real birthday can be some other time, when things are going my way, when good news abounds. 

This morning, Matt gave me a lovely gift: 

I told him ages ago that I wanted them, and then joked a lot with him about getting me an ironing board cover (Simpsons joke). But he bought them for me. And the matching necklace, too.

Then I got in the car to go to work, and although I was in no particularly good mood, the Traffic Light Gods saw fit to let me pass through two lights where I'm usually held up. I turned on the radio and heard a semi-interesting story about an assault and a car chase in Gambrills, and as no one was badly hurt and a crazy guy got locked up, it was the kind of story I like to hear. After that, the radio played "In Your Eyes", which is a song that even after all this time and all these repetitions I can't help feeling sloppy and romantic about. And then came the Doobies telling me to whoa-ooh-WHAAAH, listen to the music, and I sang along. And then there was a commercial, so I turned to WRNR and caught the last half of "Ain't No Rest for the Wicked". All in all, you see, the radio was playing just for me.

In my inbox and on my Facebook page were a dozen well-wishes (including the usual goofy birthday e-mail from Matt's brother, which always cheers me), and my in-laws sent me gorgeous flowers. An attorney I barely interact with, who always has a friendly smile for me, wished me a quiet happy birthday by the copier, totally making my morning.

So the little things are apparently going my way today. The big things are not, but the little things...well, life's in the little things, right?

At least I'll get through the rest of today without having to do this.

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Nothing about writing today. Sorry.