Hot day. As soon as I stepped outside, summer wrapped me in a thick blanket of heat and humidity. I practically staggered under its oppressiveness. More is expected tomorrow.
Which means…what, exactly? Par for the course in D.C. Our summers can be vicious brutes. A lot of people around here talk wistfully of moving to the Carolinas, where you still get the seasons but summers aren’t as nasty. Of course, they never move. D.C. has a
Boy, you can tell I wrote 547 words of fiction tonight, and in forty minutes.
Anyvay. Can’t sum up the day with any single word. Work was a grey blur; I accomplished quite a few jobs of various importance, but there’s nothing immediate or urgent drawing my attention. In fact, I spent a lot of the day working on things to prepare for the future. This is good, obviously, but it doesn’t focus the mind like a good emergency.
I came home determined to make some progress on home renovations, which has lapsed for a couple of months now, really. I got sick of the old Venetian blinds in my room yesterday, tore them down, and put up the curtains that had sat on the floor for months. That emboldened me to work on the house tonight. I don’t like to paint, but I had a few bits of trim and such that needed a coat or two of Ultra Pure White. So I taped them up, laid down old newspapers, popped a can of paint, and began painting.
…And enjoyed myself immensely. I had fun, and I’ve never had fun painting before. Perhaps it had to do with the empty house, me alone and the only person around to actually do anything, and actually doing it. Perhaps it was the simple success of accomplishing a task, right now. To quote a Terry Pratchett character: “She liked digging pits. You know where you are when you’re digging a pit.”
Then iTunes began playing Mozart’s “Ave verum Corpus,” which is my signal to start writing. So I did: 547 words of my modern fantasy novel. I’m now a hundred words shy of three thousand words, which is about 5%.
I guess it has been a good day.