Dear Reader,
You know it’s going to be an interesting morning when a print of Virginia Woolf knitting asks why you haven’t decorated its frame for fall yet, as if you ever had. Word Raccoon agreed heartily that Woolf deserved a lighted leaf garland. I shrugged and hung the decorations.
To back up, I found some decorations that had not been dispersed throughout the house yet, and so I spent the first hour of the morning putting pillows in fall shams, untangling garland and hanging it over the dining room doorway (thus taking down the heart-shaped lights that have persisted since February), and twining yet more garland over the light fixture in the dining room.
WR, do you suppose sprinkling the house with all things fall is some attempt at a protection spell (just kidding) against approaching winter?
She shushes me and says sometimes decorations are just decorations.
I am especially fond of the leaf-dotted paper lantern.
My doctor’s appointment (but isn’t it my appointment; is that ’s misplaced, WR?) led to another appointment tomorrow for lab work. Yay. Three tests to see if my ailment is anything from a vitamin B12 deficiency to something off with my thyroid (I doubt it), and we will go from there.
Before today’s appointment, I wrote on my novel, Reaccessioned. I did that thing I’m not supposed to do before I finish the draft, but I couldn’t help it. I did some polishing.
My POV character in the present-day storyline changes register so many times that it’s difficult to know whether the reader notices what she’s doing and keeps up.
Sound familiar, WR?
(Something that happened just now): Remember last year when I said I heard a squirrel squawking from the electrical lines as if getting shocked? I heard that same chattering this evening and went looking for the squirrel in distress, and yup, same squirrel, I think, same spot. I started yelling for him to come down, that I knew he was attention-seeking, and that he had fooled me last year but I knew this year he was perfectly capable of getting down. I went to get backup just in case we needed a squirrel rescue plan, and when I returned, he had jumped into the tree. Fooled me again, LOL.)
And how do you drench a passage in gorgeous detail without overgilding it? Where’s the tipping point, Dear Reader?
Do you know how difficult it is to find just the thing that says what you want to say without saying it? Like (not actually in my novel, but): The stone Rebecca bent over and chose from the lake’s edge was flat and gray, the sort her father had taught her to skip across the pond when she was ten.
Depending on what’s been going on in the story, this could show us that Rebecca has loved the lake since she was young, or that she knew how to choose a stone, or that her father spent time with her, or even that she had perhaps lived near a pond. Hell, it could mean more than that. So many choices, WR!
How many times did I stop Rebecca today as I was writing and demand she stop saying “I am”? Just show us, Rebecca, how you feel, which is a bit more difficult in first person because your first instinct is to just say it.
Psst…your readers like it when you give them something to figure out. I have to keep reminding myself of that.
Anyway, I plan to split tomorrow’s writing time between poetry and prose. I, like the squirrel, I guess, miss the electricity of poetry. I suppose I can always jump back into the novel if need be.
Drema