Formicable

December 15

It's been quite a weekend, with fierce wind and rainstorms, a couple of power outages, future-mother-in-laws arriving by train, big meals, insect invasions, and lots of work done...

The rain started on Friday, coming down in torrents. I drove my boss into Berkeley on errands, and the streets were like rivers in places, along the edges, local drainage wholly inadequate to deal with the downpour. Quite harrowing, driving in that. One of my Clarion instructors was up, visiting my boss, so I got to talk to her for a bit in the evening, before going home. Told her I'd finished a novel; la.

Friday evening Heather and I went to a neighbor's house to find out the details of our sweet catsitting gig; we cat-sat this weekend, and will do so for a week around Xmas, too, for a nice bit of payment, plus the opportunity to play with sweet, good-natured cats. Not a bad deal at all. Then we went to Susan's and spent the evening talking and drinking wine -- god, sometimes I sit back and marvel at how wonderful life is, the good people who share my time and attention. Susan gave me a delightful jumping ghoul for my birthday. It jumps and bites and leers and is altogether grotesquely lovely.

Heather and I went home and passed the time variously until we went to sleep. Saturday we rose to find the power out, though it came back on a bit later. We drove to Piedmont so I could deposit some checks (birthday money, and a royalty check that was small but quite unexpected and very welcome), and to buy food for a welcome feast for Heather & Holly's mom. (I rather like Piedmont grocery, though it's yuppie-ish -- I like to imagine being a full-time writer someday, and ambling up to such a store a couple of times a week, buying wine and bread and such, and walking back home) We bought wine, fresh fish, egg rolls, wasabi. Came home and worked on cleaning the house a bit. The power went out again in the afternoon, for several hours, and we filled the dining room with candles and kept cleaning as best we could, making the long table clear and beautiful. The power came back, fortunately, and Heather and I cooked when Holly went to pick up her mom. Once they arrived we had egg rolls, salmon with soy-honey-wasabi sauce, asparagus with lemon, and a decent bottle of chardonnay. It was a pleasant dinner.

Somewhere in there Heather and I came up with a collaborative idea. We're writing a story that consists of several freestanding vignettes with a thematic linkage, each of us writing several of the vignettes. To make it more of a collab, we each came up with seven "initial conditions" or "first causes" or "parameters" for the other person's stories -- some silly, some serious, some loose, some absurdly specific. The ones Heather set for me are:

• Must be set [at least partly] in a microscopic world

• Must have a drag king as a main character

• Characters must be outside, without shelter, in very windy weather

• Must involve a frog, a god, and at least one superhero

• Must include a goat

• Must contain the phrase "fell into the mirror"

• Must include a talking cat and a reference to Buffy

I don't have the initial conditions I wrote for her in front of me, so I can't post those, but they're similarly strange. I've already written the windy one, the drag king one, and the frog/god/superhero one, and I think they're all quite good. (That accounts for the 1,500 words over on the sidebar) I have a good idea how to do the microscopic one, but no real ideas on the others yet.

Looks like I have a collab with Mike Jasper in the works, too -- I need to write the first scene. I'm in a good, playful mood for collabs lately, though I'm still working on my Fish story as well

Let's see... today I worked a bit in the morning, reading/critiquing a couple of great stories by people on the first reader's list. Heather signed and numbered Floodwaters, then I signed, and I updated the address list, we printed labels, got stuff ready to mail, etc. I put a couple of stories in the mail, too. We got restless and walked up to Piedmont in the wind and drizzle (it was a nice walk, though), returned some videos and went to the grocery again, picked up some supplies for the coming week, bread and sandwich stuff and so forth. We fed the cats and played with them a bit and cleaned up after the minor havoc they'd wreaked (some strewn flour from a bag they ripped open, the recycling bin knocked over). Then home, made sammitches, mmm. Holly and her mom came back from shopping, and cooked goulash, yum. I read like crazy, nearly finishing The Dwelling by Susie Moloney, a good, unconventional haunted house novel I'm going to review. People went away, there was frolicking, people returned, people went to bed, I snuggled with Heather on the couch. She just went to bed a bit ago, and I decided to update, since a baby could come along at any moment, and who knows when I'd have a chance to update again after that?

The rain is driving all the ants out of the garden and into our house. I'm just hoping they aren't crawling into my computer (I should screw down the outer casing; I took it off a few days ago to fix a loose cable and haven't properly closed it up again, eep. Okay, closed it, no ants in evidence, all better). There are ants all over the kitchen floor, and counters, and in the bathroom. We kill them, they come back. We put down traps, they apparently ignore them. Sigh. They'll go away when it gets dry, and in the meantime, we make sure the sugar bowl is tightly closed.

Anyway. Good weekend. Art and family and food and love and books and cats. Being a starving writer isn't always so terribly bad.

Words written since February 1, 2002: 191,300

Words written since last entry:
1,500

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