It has been a strange week.
Last night I blew up a cake.
I'm really grateful that the glass from the pan did not explode into my eye or cut me anywhere except for this one small nick below my left thumb. It bled a bit through the Band-Aid last night, but has been fine today.
Every few times I use the stove, I misread the confusing symbols on the range top, and turn on the wrong burner by mistake. Last night I was trying to heat up some rice I cooked up Saturday to use as a base for the Sloppy Joe mix I'd just fixed. I had the cake cooling on the front burner and the rice cooking on the back, or so I thought. Three minutes into frosting the sheet of cake (still in the glass pan, which is how I intended to serve and store it), the whole thing exploded practically in my face, sending shards of blue Corning glass into every corner of the kitchen.
So hubby, bless him, swept and mopped while I fixed my bleeding hand. We didn't want the cat getting a sliver in his paw. So with dinner totally ruined, and the house filled with the smell of burnt cake, I opened all the windows and took us out for Mexican. It was a great idea.
I won't bother with the rest of the week because most of its "strangeness" is nothing I can resolve anytime soon. Suffice to say that I'm doing a lot of work on "old business" (grief, really) that will no doubt manifest one day in the form of a novel or two. My sleep patterns have been really erratic this past week, which I'm pretty certain is related low-level depression. Lots of extra napping with insomnia at night. It seems to be behind me for now.
The exploding cake blew it all out of my system anyhow. Sometimes I think we need a shock to the solar plexus to knock us out of our heads and back into the present. While I don't recommend this cake-exploding technique [Danger, Will Robinson!], it seemed to work for me, because today I have been full of energy, fully focused on the present, and going great guns on the right-brain novel. I think I'll have some semblance of a first draft by my birthday on July 17.
Or I could blame the coffee. Last Monday, I'd cut back coffee to half a cup per day, and since Tuesday or Wednesday, I haven't had any coffee at all ... until this morning. Yes, I got a lot done today, but I think it may have been in spite of rather than because of the caffeine. It did wire me, and it did make me edgy, but since I knew the edginess was caffeine-induced, it didn't really bother me.
I had a great chat today with my writing coach, who is fairly convinced (as am I) that the publishing industry in the U.S. is headed for a major overhaul at the grass-roots level, since the system is working for fewer and fewer of us all the time. Even the major publishers don't put any time, money, or energy behind their new books anymore, just the one or two "sure things" each season. Well, that's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? I mean, let's ignore those other books and make sure that they don't have a chance.
Anyhow, I spent most of today compiling an outline of the right-brain novel. I realized during my walk early this morning (to work off all that left-over bloat from last night's trip out for Mexican food) that I couldn't just keep writing into the abyss anymore. So now I am sequencing all these vignettes into connected chains of events. It's like, I've thrown all this paint at the wall, so now it's time to start blending these blobs of color into something that works as a composition. So I did a fair amount of that today as well. I will continue reading through the novel tomorrow and see what else I can come up with. After that, I will fill in the missing gaps as per this outline, and voila, first draft.
Bill's Left-Brain Novel,
as of July 9, 2007:
| |
69,885 / 90,000 (77.7%) [basically unchanged] |
Bill's Right-Brain Novel,
as of July 9, 2007:
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28,466 / 50,000 (56.9%) |
Just a reminder that my birthday is on the 17th of this month, and that's my self-imposed deadline for the first draft of at least one of these muthas.
Wishing you a beautiful day,
Bill Brent
[this page last updated: 2007.07.09, 10:05 p.m. Hawaii time]
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