Research

I have a new goal for my blog:  write every Sunday after lunch with Mom.  I think I can do this.  I really do.  Here I am today doing it after making the decision this morning.  That's a promising beginning, eh?

I have had the most enlightening couple of weeks.  Last Thursday, when I woke up early already deep in thought...Well, let me qualify that.  The thoughts were not deep, I was just tangled up in them like hot sweaty sheets.  Except that it wasn't hot.  Gotta love fall.  I do at least; it's my favorite season.  Anyway, instead of lying there allowing said shallow...well, not so much shallow as not deep...thoughts torture me, I got up, made a pot of coffee and went to work on my article/video on Marbled Bengal patterns.  About three in the afternoon, realizing what I had could only be called an "article" with tons of editing but would be okay as a blog one day AND that I hadn't had lunch yet, I was flattened by an epiphany.  I got up at 6:30 in the morning and wrote, ergo, I can write in the morning.

Huh.  And all this time, I thought I had to write at night because I've always been somewhat of a night owl and not a morning person at all.

Seriously.  Not at all.  Talk to me before I've had my coffee, and you take your life in your hands.  At the very least, I could make you cry.  There was that time I was camping at Bow Willow in Anza Borrego with my brother and sister-in-law.  Luella wakes up talking.  Make that chattering.  I tried to hint with no effect at all.  Waiting with little patience for the percolator on the Coleman stove to perk, I flat out said, "Luella, please don't talk to me until after I've had my coffee."  The silence lasted just long enough to take the edge off my nerves before she again launched into her narrative of her life.  "Erich," I let loose in my crankiest voice, "do you have any duct tape?"

So, conversation and morning are definitely out.  And unless your name is Joyce Meyer and you're on my television, I'm not interested in your monologue, either.

The thought that I might be able to write in the morning never even occurred to me.  But there it was that day.  I had.  So on Friday, I tried it out and started a novel.

Okay, so "started" might not be precisely what I did, since I started the thing eleven years ago, but the point is I got up, made my coffee and worked on it for four hours.  Really and truly worked on it.  I was so darned proud of myself, I had to tell Mom all about it.  And post it on Facebook and tell all my friends after they already had read it on Facebook.  I told Mom, "I have a new schedule."

And she replied, "Don't bother you until noon because you're writing."

I beamed with double pleasure.  That was about the most supportive thing Mom has ever said about my writing.


And I've kept to my new schedule every day I've been home since the epiphany with somewhat varying degrees of success.  As some FB friends may have deduced, what I'm writing currently involves billiards, since I keep playing "Pool Master" and calling it research.  I don't want to say too much to give it way, but I will tell y'all that the main character is a speed freak.  So, in the interest of research....

I made TWO pots of coffee this morning.  Living on the edge.