Snoring -- Holiday Accompaniements & Other Breathing Exercises

We were going to spend today in a genial haze, beginning with a nap in which the retriever managed to wiggle between us and snooze on the pillow. It's warm and relaxing to realize the the dog and the SO have matching hair and temperments, which helps one to nap peacefully. Until the dog rolls over. And stretches all four paws into the back of his master while yawning and drooling over my pillow. At this point, the nap is essentially over, replaced by a rolling hug/shove fest in which the retriever tries to reassert his position as nap leader while the rest of us to try to retake the bed. It usually ends, as it did this morning, with the retriever in posession. This leads to the next stage of end-of-holiday activities...getting crosswise with your SO over ways to enjoy the LAST DAY OF THE HOLIDAY. Do you realize that we have to go back to work tomorrow? Suddenly, people are yelling, pouting, and generally treating each other like children who must go back to work the next day. In this way, neither person is actually responsible for choosing something to do on that last day. Instead, the afternoon is left to quiet time (reading, napping, blogging) while one recovers from the headache brought on by the fight brought on by the LAST DAY OF THE HOLIDAY brought on by having to work for a living. Which, of course, reminds one to be thankful that one has a job, a SO, and two dogs to keep one company. Shortly, one will also have chicken salad prepared in the mini food processor, which will make up for the awful Thanksgiving turkey. Compressed turkeysteroids that took twice as long to cook, resulting in a Martian-dry landscape of stuffing would have made a better science project (or Sci Fi show) than dinner. Fortunately, my SO has both more patience and a greater ability to stomach funky meat dishes than I do. The dogs probably would have loved a turkey football of their own, but we didn't have a back-up plan. Now, for the Christmas Music Siesta!!

Best wishes,

Chrissa :)

Turkeys and Other Gobblers

Yawn. In the perfect hobbit tradition, I've had breakfast (early slice of pie, deviled eggs) and second breakfast (crusty homemade stuffing, potato salad), cleaned my dishes and am preparing for a pleasant midmorning nap. There will be no crazy shopping frenzy, which I'll just chalk up on the Board of Things I'm Thankful For, along with naps and warm fuzzy puppies. Yesterday, my SO recreated his mother's Thanksgiving feast in credible, edible detail. We watched the parade (and I monitored my inane chatter/constant promotion tolerance, finding it severly low this year) and the dog show. What with one thing and another, it was a day that I was thankful for, lots of togetherness and no running around and collapsing exhausted with a plate in the early afternoon. This should be about NaNoWriMo, and the triumph of 50K, but that's just not quite top of the list this morning. Rather, I'm glad that all of us were together this year, my SO and two wonderful SDs (significant dogs) and that we were able to share another glorious afternoon napping under the influence of turkey and sentiment. :)

Best wishes & happy holidays,
Chrissa

Eye Strain

Back on track with my NaNo project, I'm having to type this with my eyes closed because I've managed to strain them with a few marathon weekend writing sessions. It's a beautiful day, or so'm led to believe. I'm sitting in the dark of the computer room and tyring to dream of a low-carb casserole that I can bring t owork tomorrow, since it's my day to bring lunch. I've decided to give up on the low-carb thing at work because I'm not much of a salad person and I'm not really following the diet except every other day at work. I was accused of being one step away from a starch molecule in college and I'm just going to have to say that lumps come with the territory.

I'm coming through the slog where I was really disliking my characters. I'm sure they were just as bored as I was with the narrow strictures of their storylines. I've turned them out in the 'real' world now as refugees from the fantastic. They are learning the language, adapting to different light and noise levels, and learning to date!! Admittedly, I'm fudging the language adaption, since I'm positing a magical translation protocol that is no longer functioning when they hit the Gulf Coast in the 70's. That's really difficult for me -- I've never had more than a passing knowledge of another language and I don't really know how long immersion would take you. Similar language bases? A common language based on the closest geographical area to your fantasy realm? I could get away with that for one of the characters. I know that I won't be inventing a lexicon or a different language, so everything will be monolingual in the story.

The language bothers me somewhat, since I'm hoping to chart a realistic evolution that involves a society running in parallel to ours, several running on unrelated but rumored tangents to ours, and our own. We'll see how this goes over the next half of the book. Now, I just need a kick start for the plot so the action starts up.

Chrissa

Fuzzy Dog vs. Arthritis

As I try to concentrate on my NaNoWriMo novel, I find that I am worrying about our eldest dog, Wynn. Adapted for icy conditions found only in my fridge here in Texas, he has become prone to sliding across the tile floor and straining his hip. This is directly influenced by his need to see what's on the counter, what's out the door, or possible, what's on the other side of the retriever. Pop! Forepaws off the floor and fuzzy hind paws sliding out. Safe! Or not, as the case too often is. Thankfully, he doesn't seem to be in pain, at least not the kind of pain that results in yelps and guilt-inducing brown eyed stares. Instead, this is the kind of pain that keeps his left hind leg tucked tight to his body and morphs his gait into that of dog-rabbit.

This is not the calm influence of the retriever's tendency to nap. Except for balancing 70 pounds on my left ribcage last night (resulting in an all-day twinge today), the retriever tends to be a very relaxed dog. He is laying beside me on the floor, treating his forepaw as all-day sucker and waiting for my SO to come home so that he can relocate to the more gastronomically advantageous areas of the kitchen.

Somehow, this is converting some of the stress of the day into actually peace. I sometimes wish I could take the retriever to work, so that we could all pile on the couch for some much-needed relaxation. In the meantime, I guess I really to get some work done.

Peace and dog kisses,

Chrissa

Novel Writing Paralysis

I need to stop reading e-mail before I start writing. I spent the majority of yesterday obsessing about bland characters...after deciding that I like bland characters (vis-a-vis, my typical TV schedule). This is not an interesting or usable character flaw, unlike a penchant for sharing nachos with the dog. The white and fuzzy dog seems to be recuperating from his hip issue and the retriever is snoozing happily behind me (nacho bliss--I remember that from college).

Meanwhile, my characters are desperately trying to hijack a new story line and are currently wandering about loose in between scenes. I believe they are eventually going to hitch a ride into a more interesting yarn, but I'm still waiting for that ride myself. I've gotten them out of the castle, which was hampering their ability to do anything but stare out invisible walls and fume about things that were happening elsewhere. Although I can relate to that experience, I can also vouch for it's being nothing to share. So, I knocked the top of one of the towers and flung the little darlings out into the ocean to get themselves to a more interesting place.

My writing group seems to be doing really, even my SO has managed to pull together a decent story with an actual plot. I know this exercise is supposed to be about finishing something so that you can go back to it, but I'm not sure how to finish this particular story apart from a really dull day...the main characters are navel gazing, bend forward, and start to see a black hole where their navel should be...lean further forward and time stretches out and they circle the spiral of their own vast emptiness until SSSSHHHHWWUP! Inside out and eternity...

Well, I can only put this off for so long...I'm many words behind.

Chrissa

Oh No! NaNo!

After deciding to start NaNoWriMo over my vacation and having worked through the first few pages in more or less rapid succession, I was in a great mood to continue after going back to work. Then, I realized that I seriously disliked my story. Yes, my main character is a lump of borrowed surface that has inflated to its proper height, not quite 7k words.

The grand frustration is listening to my SO talk about his wonderful story, with actual plot and character. It's amazing. Despite being good for a few entertaining fights, it doesn't really help me to advance through the muck toward a livable story. The problem is the artificiality of the story. The main character, a prince of an Arctic kingdom of shape-shifting Walruses, is bored with the story. He'd rather be at home, exercising himself against his awful cousin, GrundWal, who believes himself to be the star of any number of wonderful fables. GrundWal is focused, and this focus helps him run more smoothly in the grooves that generations of Walrus royalty has etched in the icy redoubt that is their Beachhead.

ErwineWal, on the other hand, is an empty pair of eyeballs through which we view the story. He might as well be a wall with a peephole cut in it, for all the effect he has in the story. Crushing boredom.

It's even worse on rainy evenings, when the retreiver is as close to me as he can be because of the thunder outside, but not quite close enough to stretch out beside. Authorial privilege doesn't quite extend to stuffing the dog in the story and letting Erwine take the nap I'm really starting to want.

Belles loiterers,

Chrissa