Gang agley

Good morning!

Wow…some days, things just don’t go right. Not that there’s a crisis or anything. I woke up super-sleepy after my first full night of sleep in several days, and might’ve just stayed in bed but the cat knows my schedule and came in to demand cheese, some dripping water, petting, and so forth. So I got up and did those things. Sat around for a bit. Decided to heck with it and went back to bed, where I found the cat sleeping in the space I had warmed up for her.

In the process, my wife had woken up and was laughing at me. Or maybe she was laughing at the cat. We can call it that if we want to.

So, sleepiness still present but receding, I got up again. Went to check the outside temperature to figure out what I needed to wear. Rain. Lots of it. Oh. I mean, I have some pretty good rain gear and could put the voice recorder in a baggie or something. But even if that made sense, which I’m pretty sure it doesn’t, I wasn’t up for it.

Being the way I am–and my understanding is that this is actually fairly normal–I don’t feel especially comfortable dictating fiction where other people can hear me. Nonfiction either, for that matter. Last night’s blog post ended up getting typed, because people were listening to me, and interacting with me as if we were all the same species or something. Weird. Anyway, even wandering around the living room with the voice recorder was pretty much out since I knew my wife was awake. Not her fault: just a thing.

So I’m doing this first, and then I’m going to open a bunch of text files and spend the next hour or so fixing some plot holes that occurred to me last night as I was falling asleep. Then, there’s a lot going on today so I’m not expecting to get much work done. I’m hoping to finish the print-format version of the cookbook tomorrow, though. I very much want to dedicate all of next week to the current novel, and see what that turns into.

No new fiction today, unless you want to count however many words I’ll type while editing. Which I don’t really.

Also, for what it’s worth, I don’t actually want to work on weekends outside of the hour I get in the early morning. I generally have the kids with me, and I like to play with them. (Even if I get really, really annoying.) I also like having some time to read books for fun. I’m just putting in a few more hours this weekend because of the cookbook. I’m looking forward to seeing what full-time fiction writing turns into, you know?

Almost forgot to tell you: yesterday’s hour of dictation turned into 1849 words. Went kind of slowly, as I’d suspected. Chapter Nine has a lot of things happening, and I kind of stopped talking to figure things out a couple of times. Oh well…guess that needed to happen.

Anyway. Have fun out there!

UPDATE, POST-COFFEE: This raises a question I find somewhat interesting. Really? Weather stops me from writing new stuff? This is what I get for deciding to use a dictation-only approach to new fiction? To which I guess I have to say yeah, maybe, if that’s my stupid fucking rule. On many days I get the house to myself and wandering around, talking to myself or I guess you guys, isn’t an issue. Other days, I can hide in the bedroom and dictate. Note: I don’t actually like hiding in the bedroom. So maybe I ought to have a rule that says I dictate when I can do so in a fun way, and otherwise I just type away, all old-school? Maybe even head to a coffee shop for it? (Weird fact: I can write while totally alone, or in public among strangers, but not with family in sight, and it’s also difficult if I can hear them. Partly it’s that they interrupt–or, just as bad and not their fault, I think they might interrupt–and that kills the flow stone dead. But mostly it’s that I think about them instead of the writing, because as much as I love the writing it just doesn’t take over my brain with family present, so the flow dies either way.)

Probably typing when dictation isn’t convenient, uh, makes sense. Yeah. Okay, for next time. Duh. Look, I was sleepy, and overmuch for the thinking. Better now. See you tomorrow.

Yesterday’s dictation count: 1849 words
Time spent dictating: 58 minutes, 1 session
Week to date: 7481 words
Total words since 1/22/18: 7481