The Ink-Pot and the Palette

I knew I'd need some down time once the fun and excitement of kis and Mr Kis's visit was over, so I booked an extra week of vacation--five completely blank days on my calendar.

After a couple of nights of super-excessive sleeping and a couple of days of restorative do-nothing puttering-about-the-house, a strange thing happened: I started writing and couldn't stop.

People who write fast and fluently will probably not think much of this: to my writingest friends, a free day equals a day of actual writing, as far as I can tell--I can't think how else they get so much written. To me it usually equals a day of hair-pulling. I start, I stop, I check my email, I struggle over a sentence or a plot point till I can't struggle no more, then I take a break, and repeat the process, and that's why Restraint will be two years old in October.

But yesterday! Wow. I sat down at 11:00 a.m. and basically stood up at 11:00 p.m., and the only thing I can remember doing all day is writing. I finished chapter 38 and sent it off to my still-traveling beta, and without a pause, I opened a new document and started chapter 39.

I wish I could bottle whatever it was that made that happen.

I'll be taking kis and Mr Kis to their rental car first thing tomorrow morning so that they can be off on the second half of their American adventure, and that will end a week in which long anticipation, high expectations, and reality converged better than anything I've ever experienced.

Put another way, I've been imagining their visit for ages, it was fabulous in my imagination, and the reality has been even better than than I'd hoped.

Here's a little picture from our day at the coast:

( Mr Kis and Haystack Rock )

After WEEKS of really lovely weather, today--when kis and Mr Kis are due to arrive, the sky opened up and started pouring rain.

I leave for the airport in a couple of hours, and after rushing around for the past couple of days to make sure everything's in place, I'm just kind of sitting here, listening to it rain and killing time (and eating the gluten-free peanut butter oatmeal chocolate chip cookies I baked for the Kises and trying not to mess up the perfectly-clean kitchen).

I guess I could cart my suitcase and pillow over to my sister's house (i.e., move out), but it's all rainy out there.

So, White Collar season finale and maybe one more cookie. Then airport!

It's been true all my life and I don't see it changing at this late stage: I'll accomplish things for a deadline or for someone else that I'll let go for years when I'm my only audience.

kis has several times expressed a concern that I'm overdoing the home improvement for their visit (in three days! Eeeeee!!!), but it's a fantastic motivator, and I'm not doing anything that didn't desperately need doing.

It's the back end of a perfectly splendid September Saturday, and I'm happily tired (and prophylactically dosed on ibuprofen), having sawed, spackled, chiseled, pounded, painted and pruned things that have been left undone for as much as ten years. Several of them seemed too difficult or too complex for me to tackle, but with the Magic of External Motivation® I suddenly found simple, obvious solutions.

It's like getting a new house! I hardly know the place.

I risk talking out of class but I can't stand the excitement. So I'm disclosing here that one of my bestest fandom friends in the whole wide world, who lives a very long ways away, is COMING TO VISIT ME IN SEPTEMBER.

She and her husband are making a trans-oceanic trip to see some American stuff, including my fair city, some of its environs (and moi), and we are going to have a blast!

*runs off planning madly*