It’s Travel Day, and I’ve made it through another week. A week that seems to have seen a big speed-up at work, and a large slowdown at The Undisclosed Location.
There have been a ton of distractions of late. My personal life is complicated, to say the least, and that always seemed to bleed over into what I do professionally. Well, almost: things that happen to me outside of work, never seem to filter back to the dark, wood-lined hole that I call a cubical. Work be work, and let it remain that way. Anymore I just show up, do my time, then head for home. Or whatever passes for home these days.
Then it’s back to the hovel, where things are packed, load them up into the car, and drive to The Real Home. Spend three hours on the road cursing other drivers. Do stuff Saturday, wait for Sunday to end so I can drive back. Start up the whole mess again on Monday–
Wash, rinse, repeat.
The sameness of what’s happening, without any sort of interjection of . . . I guess you could call it “entertainment”, is starting to wear on me. There are times when I feel like a gypsy without mark; I just do what I do because, right now, there is nothing else to do. It’s an autonomous response that sees me getting up, writing, going to work, eating, writing . . . sleeping as best I can.
Seriously, I need something lively in my life.
Part of the problem–and it is a problem–is there is very little human interaction. At work, it’s come in, do you thing, go home. There is little, if any, talking. It’s like one of those cubical farms from 1984, only without a Two Minute Hate to break the monotony. Lunch is always a thing done alone. Dinner is usually solitary.
And writing . . .
We writers are solitary folk, but it seems like we’re always talking about hooking people up left and right. Look at my own stories. Transporting: couple of hookups, more than a bit of sex. Command and Captivate: please, it’s erotica. You figure it out. Her Demonic Majesty: yeah, the sorceress and the vampire hook up. Echoes: nope, just a lot of talk about families that were. Couples Dance: erotica and horror–can there be anything better? And Diner’s at the Memory’s End? A good chunk of the middle is about a hookup that shouldn’t have happened, and how it affects my main characters.
It’s all about human touch, even when my stories are taking place a thousand years from now. Take away the ray guns, and it’s all about someone walking up behind you and whispering words of endearment in your ear.
For some reason I work up with the scent of jasmine in my mind. It was a dream, I know that, but I don’t know why it was like that, because I don’t remember the dream. I just remember waking up, remembering that lingering smell, and then laying in bed for what seemed like a very long time before getting up and starting the day. It made me think that, as I have Albert and Meredith walking through the library, looking for a room that I know they’re going to find–which, of course, raises some question about Meredith’s study partner–that Albert will detect that scent, wafting off Meredith, and it’ll trigger a memory that no one is suppose to know about yet. (That’s called foreshadowing, and it points to another story.)
Maybe I should hang with my characters more often.
They seem to get out a lot more than me . . .
