I felt like today went by super slow. You ever have those days? Time seems to stretch out.
I got work done, praise be to baby g! Real work done. I’m currently stuck on this one project, which is where I left it today for my brain to roll over on in my unconscious. It’s another one with a really hard premise to get across in 30 seconds, let alone without any words…and I’m not quite sure which direction to go with it. My gut is telling me to try and get across at least ONE simple detail of the story…which is that this woman steals another woman’s baby…but then the rest of the story is soooo much more than that, I don’t know if that’s going to work, actually. The rest of the story is about these other two women bonding with each other, and it’s not about the stolen baby at all. The stolen baby is simply a plot device, a hammer waiting to fall. The STORY is about the two women. So…I could go for more of a montage feel of THAT I suppose.
I don’t know. I’ll let myself not think about it for a while, come back tomorrow, and see how I feel about it. Maybe ask a coworker what they think.
The day started off with the four of us going out to breakfast at one of their favorite little haunts. It was POPPIN there today because it’s Labor Day and Sonoma State is just up the road from this cafe, so there were a butt load of fresh-faced college kids there getting their hangover breakfasts. Breakfast was good, though my biscuits and gravy were a little on the salty side when it came to that second ingredient. Link came with us and chilled in the shade. It was hot today! Well, warm. There’s enough of a coastal range here that Petaluma/Rhonert Park stays pretty protected from that evening chill that comes off the Pacific. I suppose that’s what makes the area so good for growin dem grapes doe.
Then we came back and I sat down to work. That lasted for the rest of the day, by God, minus a (brief) nap on the floor of the office up there…then more work, and then I went out and walked with Lisa and Ryan with Link down to the golf course (same one Ryan and I will play tomorrow:) and we played “fetch” with him for a while. I put “fetch” in quotes because Link has a habit of getting the thrown ball and then plopping his butt down right there and not coming back. Silly dog. He likes Ryan to go down and chase him.
Another pup showed up about mid-way through the runaround, a pit-mix it looked like, and boy did Link and that pup hit it off. They ran and ran and ran…it was great. Link was WIPED when we got home. Then I did a little more work upstairs, ate some food, and then sat down to hang out in the living room as Ryan did some gaming, I read the rest of Stephen King’s On Writing, and Lisa and Alia watched Bachelors in Paradise, that ABC show that’s ex-Bachelor/ette contestants down at some resort in Mexico trying to fall in love.
‘Twas a good day! Happy with the work I got done. Need to get some more done for the rest of the week…but we’ll see how it goes. At least I had a solid day today. That’s key. I’d love to get some Voice Over work done as well…those queues are starting to slow down, and I don’t like to see that. Need to keep ’em full, yo!
Anyway…Liz and the pups are up tomorrow and I can’t wait to see them. Miss thems!
And yeah! I finished King’s book! It was really, really good. It’s crazy because he wrote it on either side of getting hit by a fucking car that seriously almost killed him. It was touch and go after that accident, which I hadn’t realized. I mean, I knew he was seriously hurt, but reading an account of how seriously he’d been injured really put it in perspective. The paramedics who arrived on the scene of the accident didn’t think he was going to make it. The doctors at the local hospital really didn’t think he was going to make it…I mean, he was airlifted to the nearby major hospital and taken immediately into major surgery. It was that bad. King’s account of the incident was appropriately concise and relayed without undue emotion or sentimentalization…and that’s what made it so harrowing to read. It was like a knife, an honesty knife. Details were there like asking the paramedic “Am I going to die?” and the paramedic answering back “No, you’re not going to die Stephen.” knowing full well that there was a good chance he was going to…I believe that happened. I know I’d do the same thing.
Stephen was asked to wiggle his toes by the paramedic, and after he did, he asked the paramedic if his toes had wiggled. After he was told yes, they had, he asked again “Did they really? Or did you just tell me they did?” because he knew that paramedics were trained to tell victims they had, even if they hadn’t, because the victims couldn’t tell yet if they’d lost that control. I’d do that, too. My mind would be racing, trying to figure out what had happened to me, look for signs of how well or how poorly I was doing, if I was going to be okay, wanting to be okay. And I suppose that’s the lesson of concise, clear prose – it lets the reader do the thinking for themselves, it doesn’t hand it down to them. I think this lets the reader put themselves into a given situation, and do exactly what I did: imagine what I would be doing if I were there instead of the character or the narrator.
He closed that section by talking about getting back to work. Back to writing. I’d warrant that the recovery that he’s displayed since that accident had a lot to do with his writing, that it was something that quite literally kept him alive throughout the whole affair…because it was something he knew he wasn’t finished with, and needed to get back to. Taking care of my mother after her surgery a couple years ago really illustrated to me how import “will” is on the recovery process – the desire to get better directly correlates to someone’s actual recovery. Writing was most certainly a major part of that will for Mr. King, and he write about that in his memoir. It was powerful to read that for me…it make me think about purpose, the compass that we should have in life and pay attention to. And that, of course, made me think about my own purpose.
That’s all I have for you tonight, guys, which sits mighty fine with me. Much more than just a few lines tonight, so thank you to Stephen King for being such an inspiration and such a fine, fine writer. May I have the will and the discipline to write enough words to reach that point in my life where the plane finally lifts off the runway.
Good night y’all.