words today: 1815
words total: 14,237

Ahh, it’s good to be writing again. Like stretching unused, cramped muscles. My warm-up was a 600-word erotic “fantasy” for a contest; fun and quick to write, and Teresa has pronounced it hot. It’ll be off on its way today.

Had a good chat with Phaedra as I started back into “In Her Hands”, and then kept going, after a pause to get dinner going (one of my favourite casserole-type meals, the downsides of which are that it takes an hour to cook and has about a gazillion calories in it. But it’s soooo good! that I splurge occasionally.). I’ve also worked on e-mail, done some house stuff, run errands with Ken, and other various tasks. A good day. It’s good to have energy again.

Yesterday was another day of rest and relaxation to make sure I’d beaten back the sore throat. I watched, um, various stuff I can’t remember now, and Ken returned from early-evening errands with a pizza and “Daredevil”, even though various things would be recording. So we ate pizza and pudding and snuggled. “Daredevil” had some good moments, but I thought the writing/directing was weak. For example, the opening sequence with Matt as a little boy, showing the reason for his angst, just dragged. We all know superheroes had some sort of defining childhood moment. We actually don’t need to see it in deadly detail. And Electra had no character. Who was she, other than the daughter of a guy on the Kingpin’s hit list? All we knew was that he’d trained her to not be a victim (although in a cut scene, she talks about a bodyguard). Did she have a job? What were her interests? Matt’s sidekick got better lines, even.

Anyway. I digress. At some point recently, I watched an episode of “Charmed”, one of my favourite guilty pleasures. (I soooo want to play in that world! Hear that, WfH editors? That, and the Buffyverse!) In the episode, Paige and a guy get sucked into a potboiler private eye novel that’s essentially writing itself. (Details aren’t important for the purposes of this.) Phoebe, on the outside, tries to write things into the book to help Paige. At one point, she was desperate to figure out a way to stop them from going in a particular direction. Cut to Paige and the guy. A piano falls from the sky and blocks the street.

I turned to Ken. “That’s exactly what writing is like! Sometimes you have no idea what to do, and you just have to drop a piano and keep going!”

<><><>

I really don’t know where it comes from, the ideas. As far as I know, nobody does. But I’m still amazed sometimes.

I’m sitting here, having just finished a scene, trying to decide what comes next. I thought about having the heroine and her best friend talk, maybe while walking the friend’s dog, but then I thought maybe that wouldn’t work. Then I reminded myself that the goal here was to keep writing, and if I scrapped the scene later, that was fine.

So I started typing.

And the friend’s dogs revealed themselves to be named Pepper Spray and Mace.

They’re Pomeranians.

I don’t know where they come from, these ideas, but damned if they don’t keep me amused.

<><><>

Best writing day in a long time. And then we watched the penultimate episode of Season Two of “Angel” (I had no idea we were so close to the end!), and now we’re off to bed. G’night!