First Cup of Coffee - August 8, 2018

I'm back from spending time with the grandchildren at Water World in Denver. The break was good for me - cleared my head some - so I'm talking about how even when you're not writing, you're writing. Which is true, though that's different than kidding yourself that you're writing when you're not. A subtle but critical difference. So much of life is about repetition and building skill. I'm thinking about the cycle of life, too, and how we're all connected with the cycles of the world around us.

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Good morning everyone. I know it's been a little while since I've done the first cup of coffee. It's been a busy few days. Today is August 8th, and it is 8.13 in the morning. So I have moved up my time a little bit for a bit of time away. It's been five days since I last talked to you all. My first sip of coffee. That's very good. You know, I have a Nespresso coffee maker, and I order the little Nespresso pods from Nespresso Online, oddly enough. And on my last shipment, they put in normally I get the Ristretto blend, and then this last shipment they put in an extra sleeve of 10 for me saying our gift to you, which is always nice. I probably spend enough money there that I deserve a gift, but still nice of them. And uh this is the Roma. Roma, it's a little bit lighter. That's good. A little lighter and sweater. All right. Jackson's out on his harness in the weights. Oh, there he is. Okay. I thought maybe we had to go out and look at him. But he's being good. So now he heard me. Oh, he's just resituating. Okay, we're good. We can actually talk and we can go out back to the Grape Harbor, which is no doubt doomed with Choya at this point. The passageway of Doom. Alright, there we go. We've been getting so much rain that the garden's really going gangbusters now. I need to see about getting some plants. I never did make it to Agua Fria nursery like I intended. Um that would have been nice, but last week just ended up being a freaking busy week. Okay, cover your ears. My uh book of Villa's blooming. Very pretty orange blossoms. Maybe I'll take a picture of those for you today. So yeah, I know I talked last week a lot about getting back in the habit and all of that, and it's um this is kind of a fragmented month, which I don't normally like, but um so it goes. And I've discovered that when I have solid months of no travel, I don't actually get that much more work done. I think I'm less stressed and happier, but I for some reason maybe it's because I feel like I have all of that solid time that's uh I just use it up. Notice a lot of the grapes are missing now. I'm looking around at the grapes and I of course have not harvested it them yet. Probably if I'm going to harvest them I need a plan, right? And I really don't have a plan. And we're going w I think I mentioned last week we've gone back on the keto diet, so we're not eating fruit right now. Um certainly not to just sit and eat fruit, although that's better than other sugary things. But the leaves have really taken a beating this year. The hail has been has been bad. Um in Colorado Springs, up the way from us. In fact, we traveled through there yesterday on our way back from Denver. Uh they had a huge hail storm at Cheyenne Mountain Zoo, and I guess like 14 people were injured, and a couple of the animals were killed. It was baseball-sized hail. So um, you know, good thing that there's no such thing as global climate change, or we'd be worried about these intensifying storms. Uh, alas. There's some sort of dropping on my table here. Fortunately, not where I'm sitting, but a little ways away. Fairly good size, too big for a mauser. I'm wondering if that's not Mr. Packrat. Another way, he's got he does have like little fairy chains of choya here and there. He's probably trying to mark off this whole area, but he will find himself with a fight on his hands. So Sunday, we Sunday afternoon, well, let's see, I should back up more. Uh at the end of last week, I just really dove into working, trying to get my head back into arrows of the heart, and I saw I've been doing that. I'm making progress on that. Uh delightful assistant Corrine found that I had seeded some things at the end of the edge of the blade a couple of books ago that uh I'm going to have to take into account apparently. As she put it, she's kind of funny. She says you were on a roll. I guess I was. I was sort of trying to wind up other threads and promising that I hadn't forgotten about them, and I pointed at things that I wasn't sure of, then because I'm not a plotter. So I'm at there's reasons for it. I always find out that there's reasons for these, the things that I plant. That's one of the cool things about writing for discovery is if I just keep following my subconscious, I keep following the flow of the story, then I will find that these seeds do have really cool things that come out later. And I think I know what it's going to be. I I actually did some reading in the car on the way back yesterday, and I think I know what's going to happen now. So it was good to have a break. On Saturday, I'd catch up a lot of business, financial stuff. And then I was going to write on Sunday, trying this new split schedule, and that's just not working. I really need two days off in a row. I was gonna try to get word count in before we drove to Denver, and then David ended up needing to, he really needed a new swimsuit because we were taking the grandkids to Waterworld, and his swimsuit's pretty ancient. And so he was gonna go buy a swimsuit and I and water shoes, and I wanted him to buy me water shoes too. And he said, Do you just want to come with me? Because I kind of wanted a new swimsuit too. And uh so I was like, Yeah, screw it, yeah, I'm coming. So it was fun. It was nice to go run the errands with him, and then we got back here and kind of got our stuff together and drove up to Denver and got there about 9 30 at night and hung out with my stepdaughter and her husband and the grandkids for a little bit, and then we went up to next morning went to Waterworld. And that was really a nice day. It was kind of a funny time because my son-in-law, his mother has been sick with a chronic disease for quite a long time. Um, and we knew she'd been hospitalized a lot, but we didn't realize how bad it was, and it's looking like this is the end for her. She's a really you know fine and and noble lady, very regal lady. And uh, yeah, you know, I it's like all life, right? But it's a sad thing, and they were sad and we were kind of taken aback when we got there because they'd been at the hospital and they, you know, sort of came screaming up to the house as we arrived and said, Oh, we're we're here, we're here, and and we, you know, oh, we're visiting her in the hospital, how's she doing? And he said, Well, not well at all, this is probably it. Well, you know, and what do you say to that? And well, I guess one of the things that we did say was, um, well, and we said, Well, is this a bad time for us to be here to take the kids to Waterworld? And he said, No, actually, it's really great, it's really perfect. And I guess I could see that. Um, surprisingly enough, the kids start school at the end of this week, which I didn't realize because I'm just really not a part of their usual schedule. So this really was our last possible hurrah. Uh so so it was really lovely. Um it was good for, even though I always kind of begrudged the time away, it was really great to spend the day with the kids and ride the rides and play in the waves, and they had we did a lot of boogie boarding and tried different stuff, and uh, you know, sometimes it's really good just to play like a kid, and and being with kids makes you play that way. And they're both such bright and engaging kids, they're really fun ages seven and ten. And so we just had a really good time hanging out with them, and even if my granddaughter did talk me into giving them money for the gift shop, I can't believe I'm such a pushover. I totally get it now. So Yeah, it was good to have the break. I think um you know, there's something that we talk about I don't know, I think short story writers do this too, but particularly novelists, because it's such a big arc, such a big long-term project that we say, even when you're not writing the book, you're writing the book. And there's a lot of that that's true, that it's going on inside your head, uh in the back of your mind, um, and it helped to like sort of be thinking about some of these plot threads and just letting them cook in the back of my mind as I relaxed and sort of let things open up. It's uh a little bit of a dangerous thing to I don't want to say dangerous, well it's a precarious idea because I think that there's a great deal of truth in it. Uh but I think that that's mostly true if you're a very experienced writer and you're in the habit of writing. Because I hear an awful lot of people say to me things like, Well, I've already written the book in my head. And it's like, okay, well, that's good, but until you've written a book in fact, until you have actually put all of the words on the page all the way to the end and revised and polished it, then you you don't have it yet. You haven't written the book. Um it's it's hard to explain. Um you know, the thing is is that it seems like writing a book should be an easy thing because reading a book is an easy thing. And writing down words and sentences is an easy thing. But actually writing out the whole book, getting everything down, getting all the way to the end, because a lot of people could start, um, but you have to get all the way to the end, and you have to do more than something like NanoRimo, um, National Novel Writing Month, where you write 50,000 words over the course of a month. Um, that's good for building a writing habit, but nanorimo really encourages you to take off the editor brain, which is good to learn how to do, and to just plow forward and just write and get words on the page, and that's great, but then that doesn't mean that you have a book. Um you might not have an end. 50,000 words is is short for a novel. Um, you'd have to go back and make sure your structure is there and do all of the things that you need to do to actually shape it. Um, in some ways I think nanorimo works like um sort of like the sculptor hauling in enough marble to start sculpting. You know, you kind of make your big pile of words, and once you have your big pile of words, then you can actually start making the shape of the novel from it. So until you have written at least one novel, all the way through revised, polished, and I mean that would be bare minimum. And for a lot of people it's it takes more than that. One novel's not enough. You know, some people say one million words, and you know, sometimes I think it works out to be pretty close to that. Um million words to oh well, it doesn't matter. The different people say different things, but you do have to write enough that you've uh it's um you know, it's it's like anything, you know. One thing that David talks about a lot is the Beatles playing those bars in Germany long before they were famous, and they would play a a lot of cover songs and they would play a lot and they would play their own too. But they just like every night for hours and hours and hours, they played and played and played in all of these bars. And there's something about our creativity, our the way that we build skill in ourselves that requires a lot of just doing the thing. So if you want to write a novel, you've really got to actually write it. Um writing it in your head doesn't count because I mean you could be the Beatles in your head too. You know, you'd be Paul McCartney or John Lennon in your head, and and that's great because daydreaming is important, but that doesn't mean you've actually built the skill to do it. And that's one reason why writers talk a lot about that ideas are easy, uh it's the execution that's difficult, because it's very easy to build the whole story in your head and have it there and daydream it and noodle it, and that's fun. But the skill, the difficulty comes in when you actually write it down and write it all out and revise it. Yeah, you know, there's there's that line, I don't know who said it, um, that we judge ourselves by what we think we can do and others judge us by what we have done. And while I'm not much of a proponent for being concerned about how people judge us, I do think that there's a lot of truth to that, that you know, we believe all sorts of wonderful things about ourselves, and and we should, you know, that that we could write, you know, we have this image of all of these books in in our heads, and I I certainly do that. I have these books, I got an idea for one yesterday that I was noodling in the car, and it's I'm gonna write down the idea, but then I have to let it go because I don't have time to execute it right now. And you know, as with so much in life, uh you know it really comes down to the execution. You know, can you actually stick it through to do the thing? Um, and life's not easy that way. I'm I'm thinking about uh my son-in-law's mother again. I try not to use their name since you know this is uh their private lives and so forth. I don't know what she would be to me. My she's my stepdaughter's mother-in-law. Oh well, it doesn't matter. I'm just sort of thinking about her again and you know, thinking about those you know, the difficulty being in the execution. That's what they were saying about her is that she's tired. You know, she's tired of fighting and she's ready to let go, and they wanted to bring her home from the hospital so that she could die at home and all of her family had come in, her sisters and they were all gathered around and you know, if you have to go, that's the way to do it, right? My little hummingbird friend is here. She's looking at me. Hummingbirds are remarkably tame once they get to know you. I was read something recently that said that hummingbirds and apparently a number of different kinds of birds are very good at recognizing human features, that they can actually tell us apart. And I think this little hummer knows that I am the source of the sugar water, the all-bountiful sugar water. It's an interesting thing about the way we interact with the world around us. You know, I think a lot of people think that that human beings are, you know, like that we are in control of the world and mastery of the world, and a lot of people are focused on what happens in the afterlife. But, you know, we are very much an integral part of the world around us, and the things we do affect the animals and the plants around us and more than just feeding the hummingbirds the sugar water so that they can make it through the winter. Migr make it through to migrate out. So this has been a a philosophical day, but I feel like I'm I'm ready to get back to work and Yeah, I've I have a little more head space now. It it's it's a funny thing, you know, just needing that space in my mind. I try to do a lot to keep my head clear of other things and my long-suffering assistant is very indulgent with me uh forgetting stuff, which is actually her her main job when people ask, Well, what does your assistant do for you? And I'm like, She keeps me from dropping balls. And she's very good about poking me with the requisite amount or the appropriate amount of pokiness, I guess. So alright, I'm gonna call it good. I've already had this cup of coffee, I'm gonna make another one and I'm gonna get to work. I hope that you all have a wonderful day. And it was very nice sharing my first cup of coffee with you. You all take care. Bye bye.