First Cup of Coffee - July 31, 2018

In which I *don't* talk about an annoying situation, but instead muse on days off, the work week, habits, and THE ARROWS OF THE HEART.

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Good morning everyone. It is July 31st, 8 06 a.m. What do you know? The end of July already. I'm having a warm latte this morning. Hang on, first sip. So good. It's um chilly here today. It's now up to 61. Excuse me. But it got down to like 56 last night. Past its way of doom. Jackson trying to escape. Go on. Go into the house. No, you're not going out. Isabel got to go out in the pickup garden, but it gets to because she doesn't run off and cause trouble. She's already chasing the hummingbird moths. Do you guys have those? I love those things. They look like hummingbirds, but they're giant moths, and they come in and they feed on the flowers the same way that the hummingbirds do. They're really neat. Bunch of grapes fell during the night. I wonder if they're ready. Should we try one? Mmm. Well, they are ready. Ever so slightly tart. But they're good. People always ask me if I use them to make wine. And David's talked about doing that. But it's like, I don't know, that just sounds like so much work. I know it's really not, but we usually let the birds eat a lot of the grapes, which is probably makes a lot of you cringe. But you know that a lot of our leaves are really torn up. I think it's from all that hail. It's been a stormy, a stormy monsoon season. Not gentle rains, but really heavy ones. Anyway, I should think about plucking some of these grapes. If only to eat. If only to eat. So we mixed things up a little bit this weekend. David left me breakfast, so now I'm eating my eggs too. Because David's been driving for Uber a lot, which is actually being a pretty decent living. But and Santa Fe's a tourist town, so that works out well. But a lot of the tourism is on the weekends. His best driving days are like Wednesday through Sunday. So I took Saturday off of writing. I typically only write five days a week and I write on the weekends. Or I take I'm sorry, five I just write all the time. No, I write five days a week and then I take off the weekends, which is sort of left over from when I had a day job. And it's funny when you think about it, how you get, you know, sort of inured to not inured, but um habituated, I guess, back to habits to certain patterns. Um, I think it's funny how a lot of people talk about when the kids start going back to school in August that summer is over. And it's like, well, summer's not over, you know, your school summer vacation might be over, but that has nothing to do with the seasons. But you know, a lot of people their whole lives, you know, are dictated by the the school schedule. Mine not so much. Likewise the work week schedule shouldn't matter anything to me. So we were all disrupted from me being gone to conference and then we went on our little aqualge mini vacay, mini break. I always think of that scene from Nottinghill, you know, when she's in the bathroom and going, and he wanted talk talking about going on a mini break. I love that. Uh I'm a little scattered this morning, maybe. Actually I'm very ranty this morning. There's something that's made me very annoyed and I can't talk about it, so I'm like, have all of those words that I'm not saying. Um except that you know it's just no, I'm not even gonna say that. Sorry. Don't mean to be a tease, really. I'm not trying to, I just need to let this go. Alright, anyway, work week schedule, all of that. I took off Saturday and did I actually lazed around for a whole lot of the morning, most of the day, um, until about two. It was funny because I was feeling kind of like a slacker, but I was tired and I woke up and lay in bed and David had gone off to drive, and I lay in bed and read for a while, which I almost never do anymore, and it's one of my favorite things to do, just lie there in bed and read. And then finally I got up and I put on my robe and my socks because it was also cool Saturday morning, and made my latte, and then I went and sat on the front porch and and continued to read. I had uh I have very good friends and they were saying to me, Be lazy, you deserve it, enjoy being lazy. So I did. And and my friend Margaret said, Isabel, leave it alone. Hopefully this hummingbird moth sees her. I don't want her to get it. Isabel. Okay, it did fly away. That's good. Um I'm sorry I have so many interruptions this morning. Margaret said uh that I would probably get tired of being lazy after a while, that that was what always happens to her. And sure enough, around two o'clock I did get tired of being lazy. David came home for lunch and left again, and I had actually gotten dressed by that point, and I talked to my mom. My mom always complains that hi mom, I know you're listening. My mom always complains that I never uh sit still when I'm talking to her on the phone. But I I don't like sitting still when I'm doing something like talking, with the exception of this where I'm sitting here drinking my coffee. So I started changing the sheets on the bed and doing all those things, and then I ended up getting all the laundry sorted and clean the house, and I was very productive. And then David and I talked about that maybe what we should do is like take uh Monday or Tuesday off instead, went which tend to be very uh low driving days for him. For some reason, people just don't maybe because the tourists aren't here then, or people just don't take Uber and Lyft as much on Monday and Tuesday. So we took uh so I worked all day Sunday, I started working on Arrows of the Heart, revamped the first chapter, so at least my four months away uh gave me a little bit of perspective. I probably didn't rant to you guys about that, but I finally got to open arrows again. And I last opened it on March 20th. March 20th. So for those keen listeners who can do math, that was over four months ago. It just kills me. It's like a third of a year, a third of a year disappeared somewhere in there. And my my wonderful friends who are very patient with me pointed out all of the things that I've been doing in that time, but still I just can't believe it's been four months. So it goes. So it goes. So at least I got some perspective on the book, and I tore apart the first chapter and put it back together again, and I think it's better now. And I did post um seven lines from the seventh page on Facebook. That's kind of a a meme thing that people do. And Grace, my friend Grace Straven, tagged me to do that. And then this is this is the best compliment in the world, right? Because Grace then uh we were messaging, chatting about something, and she asked me how much of the book was written, and I said, well, about 32K at this point, 32,000 words, and she said, um, well, that the seven lines that I'd posted were to die for and could she have what I'd written so far because she really, really wanted to read it now. She said she was pulling best friend cards so that she could get a sneak peek and read it now. And I said, sure. And I told her things I'm I'm going to absolutely use her as a critique and have her watch for a couple things for me. So but I thought that that was that made me really happy. That she liked that she won it's always the best thing when your friends really look forward to reading your books. Speaking of, I have her new one, her the one that'll release this fall, Phoenix Unbound, on my Kindle now, so that's in the queue to read. I'm in the middle of reading some contemporary things right now, so I'm sort of on that kick, but then I'll come back to it. I'll tell you about those in a minute. Um anyway, so we ended up taking Monday off instead. I worked all day Sunday and we took yesterday off. And that was we we talked about like going fishing or doing something fun, and David said that he really wanted to get some things handled because we haven't had that many days where we were both not working. Uh so that's part of the point of doing this. So we ended up running a lot of errands and taking care of things and uh Margaret said that's one of her favorite things to do with her husband too, which is funny, you know, because it's like not not glamorous or exciting or entertaining even. But there is something nice about sort of like managing your household stuff together and running those errands and doing those things. So the only errand I didn't run was I didn't go to Agua Fria nursery. I've got a coupon for $20 off that expires end of July, which is today, obviously. So I might go do that because I would like I'm still trying to fill in the secret garden here. You have to spend $75 to do it, but I often spend at least that much there anyway, so I should probably take advantage, advantage of the savings. So I've been reading a lot, which is nice. Um I read Kristen Higgins Now That You Mention It, I bought that after she won the Rita for it. And she won it in mainstream with commer with romantic elements. And it does almost read a little bit more like women's fiction um and less heavy on romance. And it was so good. I had read one of Kristen Higgins' contemporary romances a while ago, and I'd liked it fine, but I didn't love, love, love it. And gosh, I love this book. It was um first of all, the opening page is uh just a masterclass in how you hook a reader and establish character and relationships. Uh she just did an incredible job of that. And then uh the book is just utterly delightful and insightful both about a woman who's had a bad accident and she goes back home to her mother's house so her mother can help take care of her. And her mother is this very stoic woman, and there's her father, the girl's the protagonist's father had left when she was young, and the sister hasn't spoken to her in all these years, and she hasn't gone back since high school, and you know, it's sort of re-encountering all of these things like her younger self and re-establishing a relationship with her mother as an adult, dealing with her sister's niece because the sister is now in prison in Seattle, and so the niece is living with the mother, and it's um full of female relationships and almost impossible to explain why it's so good, but it's just wonderful. Yeah. So because I love that one so much, I picked up um another of hers that I'd grabbed at the RWA conference, which is an ARC, an advanced reader copy. So that one's on paper. And that is, um I probably shouldn't eat, right? Sorry. But my eggs will get cold, you guys. Um so this one is called Good Luck with That. And it's a print advanced reader copy. The book comes out like August 7th, so just in a week. And uh, it's totally different than the other one. It's totally different than now that you mention it, um, much I don't want to say darker in tone, but maybe more somber in tone. And it alternates between two first person protagonists, both women, who are very good friends. And it's about dealing with weight. And it's just really incredible. It's especially interesting because the the way the book opens is that there are three friends who have three girls who, as teenagers, have bonded and become very good friends at what they call fat camp, where they go every summer to lose weight. And th they are all women who have struggled with weight since childhood. And the book opens when one of them, who they haven't seen in a few years, um, is in the hospital and they rush to the hospital to go see her, and she is hugely, morbidly obese, you know, like where they have to cut the doorway open, the firefighters had to cut the doorway open to get her out of the house and take her to the hospital, and she dies. And it's just, you know, of course, horrible, and they feel terribly guilty. And then there's all of these feelings about, you know, all of that kind of you know, all the stuff about weight, you know, and the self-loathing and the, you know, how could she you know, and being kind of revolted by how fat their friend had gotten, and feeling like, well, at least I'm not that fat, but then feeling like, but yeah, I am too fat. And one of the really interesting things about it is it's Georgia and Marley as the two protagonists that you alternate between their points of view and their struggles after Emerson's death. You never know they never say exactly how much they weigh, they never say how fat they are. They always talk about it in terms of, you know, like what sizes they can't fit into, because they make it end up making this list. The the girl who dies gives them a list of all the things that they always said they would do once they had lost enough weight. And one of them is shopping a store for normal people, which is like a store where the sizes end at size 12 or size twelve fourteen. Otherwise, you never know how how heavy these women are, and it really doesn't matter because what's important is how they feel, and and I'm someone who, you know, came from, you know, I was pretty skinny as a teenager and I did pretty well that way. Uh and later in life, you know, it's it's a constant struggle to uh keep the weight off and try to regain uh or try to lose what I have and try to get back to certain places in my life. And it's one of the interesting things about this book is how they point up, you know, sort of this pattern of thinking, how you put things off and think, well, you know, I'll I'll do that once I lose this weight, once I take off this much weight, then I will do that thing. And then you end up putting it off forever. You know, and I know that at one point, I it might have even been in my twenties, I was thinking about like doing some of those boudoir photos for David, and I thought, well, I'll I'll do those once once I lose a little more weight. I've never done them, never done them. And and I noticed myself doing it just recently, because one thing that we really like to do with the grandkids up in Denver is take them to Waterworld. And we went with them last summer and they they love it, and this is like our special thing to do with them. And and they're such a great age, seven and ten now. And we're going to go up well, I've been thinking about it all summer. It's like, when the heck are we gonna do this? I didn't know when we were gonna fit this in because obviously I lost three four months, a third of a year, somewhere in there, and I thought, when are we gonna do this? And then uh my granddaughter Arrow, who is the younger one, she's seven, and forgets nothing. This girl has uh she is so good with like time and distance, and like if we drive up to Buffalo like we did for her great-grandmother's funeral, David's mother's funeral, you know, like she knew exactly how much longer it would take all the time. And so uh her mother Lauren texted us and said, Errol wants to know when you're taking them to Waterworld. I was like, well, yes, Errol can look at the calendar and say that school's gonna start before too much longer. And um, and I don't want to let them down, but you know, I had been I caught myself thinking about it and thinking, well, gee, you know, I'd love to put this off until I lost a little bit more weight, so I'd look good in my swimsuit at freaking Waterworld. And, you know, and that's not a reason. And and it's not we're we're going to take them next Monday. We're gonna drive up to Denver in the afternoon and take them to Waterworld on Monday, and it'll be really fun. And I am not gonna worry about how I look in my swimsuit, right? But it's interesting reading this book because it's sort of you know about that emotional thing and where you're just always thinking about how your body looks, or you know, maybe not always, but how you keep slipping back into it. Hello, Isabel. Yeah. She came jumping up onto the table here and getting it on the wall. Yeah. She's gonna jump up on the wall and go over, probably around to the front. Oh, she's gonna sit up there and survey the neighborhood. It's a good job for her. We call her guard cat for a reason. So anyway, that's uh that's kind of where I'm at with things. I think I will um yeah. I think I tied up all of my threads, didn't I? You could tell I talk exactly the same way I write. I sort of go off on various tangents, but I think I tie them all up again. Uh thank you all for listening. That's been lovely sharing the first cup of coffee with you for the day. And I am going to go work on Arrows of the Heart, keep my eyes on my own work, one of my favorite mottos. And I will talk with you all tomorrow. Have a great day. Bye.