Mornings and Stuff.

Yawn. I CAN NOT WAKE UP this morning. I had my usual two cups of decaf, which usually does the trick, but not today. So, now I'm on my second caffinated coffee. Hmm. Lets see, its been a few days since I posted here last.

taxlady and I went to Cornwall to visit my folks on the weekend. I even brought along my trusty old 386 laptop (codename: Betty Boop) so I could get some writing done if the opportunity arose. Well it did on Sunday morning but I didn't get as much done as I might have liked. Still, it proved the viability of the method. I think I'm going to see if going to a writing Jam on Sunday is an effective use of my time or not. On the one hand having a block of several hours devoted to writing that day may help a lot. On the other hand it will eat up about 4 hours of my day getting there and back because transport to/from the West Pole on Sundays is awful. That's time I might have spent writing. I'm also not sure how well I'll write in company, even if everyone else is busily typing away. I guess I'll just have to find out.

While we were in Cornwall, I made friends with a cute little stray kitten my folks have adopted. He was seen on my brother's property for a week or so before he was finally enticed into his house with some food. He would have liked to have kept him, I'm sure, but with his wife due to have a baby any day now, the timing was just wrong, so my folks got him. My brother will just have to put up with having "Mr. Stinky" as a pet for now. Mr. Stinky is a wild skunk that has taken to visiting my brother's place, and animal-lover that he is, he's been feeding him (using a long BBQ fork, I gather).

Anyway, the kitten is almost completely black with a few small blazes of white on the neck, chest and groin. He has startling amber eyes and my mom has dubbed him "Beamer". He's cute as a button but rather skittish at the moment. He was rather underfed when my folks adopted him three weeks ago, and he still wolfs down food when its available, but he didn't look undernourished when I saw him. He was very reluctant to be approached by me until I had food in my hand. Once he'd had some of my breakfast sausages, he was my friend for life.

Speaking of the sausages, they were smoked buffalo meat, and man were they yummy! My dad claimed the Emu(!) sausages were better, but they were all eaten before we got there. So, if anyone on my f-list is missing a large ruminant or giant flightless avian, I'd start looking in Cornwall.

When we got back from our trip Sunday night I crashed and slept for something like 16 hours, getting up around 10:00 am on Monday. Other than a major shopping excursion to catch up on groceries, and my cooking lunch for the crew, the day was spent writing -- or trying to. I did get a respectable bit done and finally got past the opening scene that has been giving me such trouble. I'm hoping my pace will pick up from here on out -- at least until I get to the next love scene. Man those things are hard to write at all, never mind to do well. Ah well, its why I chose to write Erotica. I wanted to challenge myself there, and its doing so. The SF bits are a breeze to write, by comparison.

Naturally I couldn't sleep come evening, as I'd had so much sleep the night before. I finally fell asleep around 4:00 am. I dragged myself out of bed at 10:00 am this morning as I didn't want to let my hours get too skewed. One good thing I did accomplish while laying in bed was to sort out some plot problems. I realized that if Scene A and Scene B were both the first time that 'X' happens, then they logically must be the same scene. I also figured out how to deal with the fact that the combined Scene A/B needs character 'C' who just wrote themselves out of the book for the next several chapters, while Scene A/B needs to happen REAL SOON NOW. Ah, the joys of winging it.

Now that that is all worked out, and the house is quiet because both taxlady and Terry are out of the house on various errands, I just have to wake up enough to start writing already.