Tuesday: I am writing when I wake up. It’s not the first thing I’ve done today, because I had a meeting for work at 8am and I slept until 7:45am and stayed in bed snuggling with Paulie’s warm body curled up on my shoulder until he saw a squirrel in the tree outside and went to the window to investigate and by then it was already almost 8am so I logged into the meeting on my phone with microphone and camera off and got up to use the bathroom and make some coffee.
Friday: Having the window slightly open makes my small apartment feel bigger. A train horn honks in the distance and the sound of the freeway, a low buzzing like an air conditioner motor, adds some texture to this quiet morning scene. This week was really busy for me and I’m still recovering from staying up all night Tuesday and working into Wednesday. We launched a world tour at work on Wednesday morning at 2am my time and I was online to handle any troubleshooting for the folks in Europe who were having issues with the pre-sale link. I took a one-hour nap on Wednesday morning at 7am, but went right back to work upon waking. I went to bed at 9pm that night and the rest of the week I have been falling asleep before 11pm to help my body recover. The days of partying and staying up all night are long over. The summer after graduating highschool, staying at my friend Will’s house in the countryside and taking long walks with friends in the middle of the night on totally desolate roads, like vampires who own the world while everyone is sleeping, just because we were young and we could, that feels like a lifetime ago. It’s so far removed from my life now that it doesn’t even feel like that was ever my life.
Saturday: Paulie sits loaf style on my bed, digesting his canned food breakfast. I gave him some rotisserie chicken earlier this week as a treat. Today, he made several attempts to take a bite or a lick of my hot chicken sandwich. I don’t think the two events are related, he just really likes chicken. The family who had fostered him before I adopted him told me this. I finished reading 1001 by Daphne Gottlieb and worked on the review. I even popped up in her facebook messenger to ask her some questions and we had an interesting conversation about writing processes and rape culture. Interviews, especially live interviews where you’re not just sending someone an email with a bunch of prepared questions, make me nervous because I want to ask good questions and not just basic ass questions. I took notes while reading the book so I was able to refer to those while chatting with Daphne, and doing it over text instead of in person or with voice helped me because I was able to re-read what she had said and ask questions based on her answers. The release date of 1001 has not been determined so I have time to make the review really shine.
Sunday: I need to turn in 5,000 words today for the fiction workshop I’m taking, which means I need to spend the better part of today cleaning up and beautifying the first chapter of my novel. I still don’t know if this is a story worth telling. I have 75k words written and I know what ideas I’m trying to explore but I don’t know if I’m succeeding in exploring them and if anyone will care. Caring about how an audience may perceive the book might not be the most important thing. I should perhaps focus more on how I feel about it, if it excites me or moves me. I had a conversation with Amy about the book and she asked me why I wanted to write this story and all I could think to say at the time was, well I already have most of it written. Thinking about it more, I want to write about it because I think it’s interesting! The ideas I’m trying to explore are things I think about all the time. They excite me, but I need to communicate them better. The way I see it in my head isn’t exactly what’s come out on the page. I need to work on that.