or, what to do when you’re in between places and can’t really write because you can’t brain for a few months.
(The writing update is about 4 paragraphs down if you don’t care about gardening and accounts of hard physical labor or golf.)
Deb and I have spent the past couple of months getting our house fixed up. She’s done most (well, almost all) of the painting. My brush work was deemed not up to snuff and I was banished from further application. I did much of the taping and some prep-work though, and am now responsible for replacing all our baseboards, which is going swimmingly, thank you very much. I do enjoy firing nails from a gun. We’re almost ready to move the rest of our stuff in and get it out of storage, which’ll be great, but also will force a bunch of organizing and cleaning and futzing which will almost certainly be more chaotic than I’d like it.
We still have no kitchen. Washing dishes in the bathroom sucks, let me tell you.
Then there are the gardens. I took a bunch of pictures last Thursday and Friday with the intention of hijacking a garden update, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet, and I’ve kind of lost interest. I can report that there are zucchinis aplenty and I have to add more dirt to my potatoes before they escape the confines of their towers. Towers of tubers. So many.
But it hasn’t all been back-breaking, manual labor! No, I’ve been playing a fair bit of golf, too. Usually, two to three times per week. It’s such an incredibly frustrating game. I think it’s more of an exercise in mental training than physical, although there’s plenty of that too. Minute tweaks and adjustments of the physical machinery. Understanding what to do when the ball is in an awkward lie or a different cut of grass. Reading the greens. I think my best score’s been 93 this summer, while my all-time best is 87. I won’t tell you my worst score.
And then there’s been the camping out in the yard and having barbecues and firebowls. That’s always fun.
Most of all, I’m really looking forward to getting back into writing. I have a few projects on the go, sitting in editors ready to accept the free-flow wordspew from my mind-brain. Of course the third book in the New Providence series is still percolating and gestating in there, just shy of 40k words. I have a tentative title for it and it’s not Trajectory Book 3. Not to worry though, the main characters from Books 1 and 2 are in there. They’re not done yet. But the focus of this book is going to be a bit different, so I think the title change is not unreasonable. I have another story that I’m intending to be novella length set in New Providence that I keep poking at when I have a spare moment. And now I have a couple of short stories I’m working on that I’ll be able to tell you about soon enough. I’m excited about these as it’s something different and challenging and requires a different kind of writing. Short stories have very different constraints. Word constraints. Because short.
It can’t happen soon enough, but in the meantime, I have this blog I can throw things into and that’s about the right amount of writing when I have other work to do.
Speaking of work, now back to cutting baseboards.