I had a wonderful dream. I know I did when the Monster Boxer woke me up just a short time after sunrise, thinking, right before I dropped my head back in the pillow, “Gawd, I need to remember this one,” and tightened my hold around the monster’s thick neck, just to keep her immobile for a few more hours of sleep.
When the alarm screeched the dream was gone, however, making me more than a little frustrated when I get out of bed and toss the dogs out trying, without success, to dig the details out of my un-cooperating brain. Grrrr. It was marvelous, thrilling, exciting and…it is completely gone, making me want to grab Trin Trin, the monster, and shake her.
Alas I’m not that vengeful and just go through the morning, grumbling at her about how she ruined a perfectly good Blog subject for me with her usual shenanigans. She just stares at me with that bored wide-eyed look, turning around mid-rant and leaving me talking to the empty spot she left behind with the common courtesy of requesting to be excused. The nerve! She took the wind right out of my sails.
Shaking my head at her lack of compassion, I make the bed and then get dressed.
The sky is overcast–it has been since my rude awakening in the morning–and a distinct chill swirls through the air while the dogs and I make our way down the mountain towards the courtyard gate.
Still not a workout day, yay, so as soon as I’ve deposited my bag on the kitchen counter, I head back outside to take down a small amount of laundry and continue to lug out the three batches that have been done during the night for hanging.
Those done I head into the house for a few pull-ups, a quick breakfast and then settle behind the computer with my coffee and cigarette. Messages are rapidly dealt with. The Holidays keep people busy so there is really little to answer before I spend half an hour on the forums and then switch over to reading the psychic novel parts I’ll need in order to continue writing the story.
It takes me only a few pages before I get into the mood and scroll through to where I last wrote for this particular tale. I manage to add half a page, while interacting with big brother who’s trying his hand at actual writing be starting the vampire novel on his own. It goes pretty well, he even admits so himself when in the past he’d always find himself getting stuck in the first paragraph because he wants everything to be perfect from the start.
It would be great, of course, but regretfully that is not how writing works. It is a painstaking process of first just letting the words flow out unhindered by actual thoughts. (For me it is, at least.) Then, once this is done, you go back time and again to remove redundant statements, repeats, punctuations, typos, and shifting around everything until a semblance of a “done” story begins to take form.
A long tedious process, that requires occasional settle periods, nightly ponderings, and daily reproves on how you could possibly have written something that asinine?…only to find out that in the end only the basics of the story are actually there unchanged from the way it was first written.
It is frustrating, time consuming and utterly…satisfying in the end when you’re reading through the final product of your imagination.
I do admit to feeling a sense of excitement for big brother who is really just starting on his road of discovery into the complex world of writing. He is still experiencing the wonder of creating an illustrative sentence, even the smaller ones, and such marvel is what made me addicted to becoming an author in the first place.
He’s got the imagination, and the sense of pace necessary for contemporary paranormal fiction–as he should, after reading the genre for years–and as soon as he has developed the necessary vocabulary he’ll learn real fast to match my own speed in writing a story down.
He’s a better sport than I am, too. He doesn’t appear to mind my suggestions at all, having attitude of “add and remove what you think isn’t right”, with an ease that astounds me at times.
Personally I’m too set in my ways now to manage such a feat. I need to let my fingers rattle in the first burst of writing, with as little input from the outside as possible lest I lose my grip on the sometimes elusive thread of inspiration.
Edits and suggestions in the midst of that only confuse me, and make the fountain sputter to a stop if I’m not very careful.
Later on I’m fine with it. If something doesn’t flow, or make sense, I appreciate his input well enough, but first I actually need to get all that’s swirling in my head down on the proverbial page.
Big brother, on the other hand, actually seems to thrive on continuous input, which earns him considerable kudos for as far as I’m concerned.
It is a rather thrilling concept, really, what with the two of us producing stories at a staggering speed. I wonder what all we’ll manage to create into the variety of genres we’re interested in. Action, Sci-Fi, Romance, Paranormal, Fantasy, horror and Thrillers: The sky would be the limit, I’m thinking…thought admittedly the last two are more my area of expertise. Hah.
While I type a page or so, he manages three quarters of one and it has him positively cheery. I don’t blame him either. Back in the day when I first started out, a full page was a day’s work, and it would be a disaster in edits, hah. He’s far better than I was at the beginning, that’s a fact.
Halfway through the session I get momentarily distracted upon finding a recording program on my computer, and mess around with recording several texts from my books–and listening to them–just to see how they’d sound.
It’s not bad. My voice appears to have changed over the years. It’s become huskier, I think, and rather than the annoying European accent that always drove me bonkers in the past, I can now switch from Old English to American. I just might attempt a serious recording some time in the near future.
Still, with both of us having made a solid dive into our separate projects, dusk has arrived and I shut the computer down to start on dinner.
Couscous with veggies will be it for today, and I chop onions and garlic to glaze in a curry herbal mix before adding half a pack of the dried couscous, which I bake that way for several minutes.
Some salt and sugar for taste, along with pepper precede the liberal pouring of boiling water that will soften the couscous while the flavor has already settled in the mix.
Next come the red and green bell pepper pieces, sliced cauliflower, green beans, peas and sweet corn that finish the list of ingredients. Thirty minutes after I began, dinner’s ready for consumption, earning me several compliments on a dish the younger sibs really enjoy. With a liberal add of cottage cheese, I too enjoyed the meal, and start cleanup immediately. Little needs to be done, since the meal was simple, so fifteen minutes later I look around to see what’s next.
The pantry is a mess, or so I noticed during the course of the week, and I decide to clean it prior to starting on the kitchen project. Bottles of soda are scattered over the floor, bags of dog food are randomly placed on the expanse of floor, and in the section where the washing machine stands laundry actually tumbled out of the bags.
Grumbling about the obvious lack of care about the mess in there, I spend almost an hour putting the room to rights, and then proceed to get the canned supplies from the kitchen, so I can empty the old storage cabinet.
While it is slowly depleted of its contents I realize that the design is really quite similar to that of the new kitchen, and after examining the structure for a bit, big brother and I decide that it will be really easy to make adjustments to the structure.
By sawing off the bottom shelve it can easily be tipped on its side. Then, using the former shelves as walls and the removed section as new, shorter shelves, it will be a smaller, much more manageable supply closet that’ll fit perfectly beside freezer.
Recycling; you gotta love it–and as an added bonus it will save us at least € 100 in new materials. Perfect, we decide and set to work.
Big brother diverts his attention between the lot of us, helping out where he can, and doing some more work on the electrical outlets for the fridges that has us without power when something shorts during the procedure.
No matter, though, the problem is fixed within several minutes and work is once again in full swing.
So, while little brother and sister are painting the wall where the freezer and fridge were yesterday, I begin sawing and sanding the soon-to-be new supply closet.
Across the counter, middle sister is preparing the primer she’ll need to paint the cleaned wood, and starts on that task by the time I’m ready to cut the shelves out of the old, long one.
It seems almost predestined, since everything fits with little more than an inch to spare. I love it when things work out like that.
The radio is mostly playing atrocious Christmas songs, and this earns the stations a lot of grumbling on our part while we take turns skipping to different ones in search for something a little less seasonal. In the end we settle on one of those noisy stations with lots of base and repeats that normally wouldn’t come from our speakers for any price…but, all the Christmas “cheer” is just too much to bear. Hah.
It takes most of the night to re-make the cabinet just right, but in the end, with two layers of paint covering it up, we’re quite pleased with the end result. Measurements throughout have shown that we should be able to hang the new-old shelves on just the right height to allow room for the small electrical grill and microwave, and allowing room to spare of the small steel baskets that hold the fresh produce.
With little brother and sister starting cleanup around us, middle sister and I finish our painting and put the new structure away so the big cleaning can get done.
Glue spills from the previous tiling night need to removed from both wall and floor tiles, paint splatters get swiped away and the general mess is dealt with until half an hour before midnight everything looks remotely presentable once more and we all go our separate ways.
What with it being early still, big brother and I both decide to get back to writing, and delve into our prospective worlds of literature for an hour before I head on up to my quarters and start preparing for the night to come with a solid two pages for the day under my belt.
Big brother is thrilled about having managed the same amount during the day, and we talk over the house phone several times during the course of the evening.
I’m in the midst of cleaning my bathroom when the first call comes in, and I’m just about to start up my computer the second time, making me smile once more at his enthusiasm.
At long last I settle down for my nightly session, and soon start on today’s Blog in hopes that I can get it done in time. I can’t, of course. As usual I get carried away and end up writing more than I’d intended. Also, a few more attempts at the recordings, messing around with singing some of the songs I like best, takes much longer than I’d intended. I’ve decided that my voice sounds best with Alanis Morrisette songs, Jewel, Ilse Delange and Katie Melua songs. Very cool.
Too late, again. Ah well. This is Samaya’s World nonetheless.
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