Cold Posturing

The last year has seen me getting sick a lot more than I’d been in the four years before that.  When you’re not in contact with people day after day, you avoid those viruses that will bring you low.  When you get back to the work force, however, you find those little bastards have been waiting for you with a glee in their non-existent eyes . . .

I’ve had at least three colds since getting back to work, and the worst was over last summer, when I had a respiratory infection that decided to stick around for two months.  I had trouble breathing, I had trouble sleep, I had trouble just getting through the day.  It wasn’t in any way fun, and for a while I thought I was going to lose my mind because I was suffering from extreme exhaustion.

Near the end of January I caught something that started to lay me low before I kicked it back.  Then, a week later, it tried making a comeback, and I manged to beat on it a little more even though I ended up having to take a day off.  I thought I was over that . . . until yesterday.

Early in the morning I felt the sore throat coming on.  Before I left for home I felt the fever coming.  By the time I was home from work I was burning; I don’t know what my temp was, but I was up there.  I hurt all over, my sense of time passage was way off . . . yep, fever was on, and all I could do was med up and hope for the best.

I didn’t sleep much last night, and though I feel a little better, I’m sweating like mad and suffering chills off and on.  My head is very wibbly-wobbly, and I’m certain I’m going to need a nap before the day it out.  Maybe I’ll even need to run to the store to pick up some medication, because I’m almost out.

Needless to say, I didn’t write last night.  Couldn’t write was more like it; the head was all over the place and my fingers were comfortably numb–so much so it was hard for me to even feel the keyboard.  It was all for the best, because there was no way I was going to do anything that would have made sense.  Not to mention when I’m feverish my sense of time passage goes right to hell, and I probably would have thought I’d been writing for an hour when the reality would have been more like ten minutes.

I wrote stoned a couple of times, and while it seems a good idea at the time, what come out on the other end was pure, unfettered crap.  Nothing I’d typed made any sense, and it was at that point that I decided that while I might be able to write with a bit of a buzz on, no way I was going to producing any kind of work I’d be proud of when I was too far gone to be unsure I could walk a straight line.

It’s like that when I’m extremely sick.  The body and mind are telling you to stop whatever the hell it is you want to do, and just rest.  So I rested.

Today is another day.  Lets see if I can get back into my work–

And not feel guilty about not writing due to being incapacitated.

Ill-Well in Writerland

It would seem the sickness has come to Helltown, aka, my own little neck of the world.  And I don’t mean sick like what I had last year about this time, but sick as in I feel the fever coming on, and not in a Bruce Springsteen sort of way.

It was like this for most of yesterday; the chills, the stuffy nose, the warm ears that are always a precursor to coming down with a fever.  I medicated and even liquored up a bit last night, hoping to stop this sucker in it’s tracks.  And I thought I had it licked–

Ah, but these viruses, they are crafty, they are.  They will stick with you, and haunt your butt until you think they’re gone, that they’ve pulled up stakes and headed for the hinterlands.  And then, WHAM!  They have you, bwah hahahaha!

It plays hell with the writing gig, let me tell you.  It’s already hard to concentrate, and now you need medication to help hold it down, and if that doesn’t make you spacier, then if you decided to have a margarita, or two, hoping it will do something for you at the same time–ha! You foolish person, you’re going  to find yourself on the low spark of high heeled boys rather quickly.

Though I was doing this last night . . .

It was hard to type, and at one point I actually nodded off at the keyboard while thinking.  Still, I managed four hundred sixty-five words, which isn’t a great shake by any means, but it’s wordage.  And it’s almost five hundred words closer to the end than if I hadn’t written anything.

I know what you’re thinking:  why?  If you’re not feeling good, oh Little Cassie, why are you writing?  Why are you trying to think and work on a story?  Are you trying to impress us?

I’ll impress you when I put the stuff out there to read.  As for the rest . . .

Writing while sick is a pain, and a huge crap shoot.  When you’re falling asleep and feeling like you’ve been beaten half to death by Mjölnir, one could think that trying to do something worth while is a fool’s journey.  Nothing good will come of it.

Unless . . .

Maybe years ago I read something by Stephen King.  I know, that’s like saying, “One day I drove down this road,” but hang with me.  He mentioned that one day, in the early 1980′s, he’d come down with the flu, and he was in very bad shape; he may have mentioned that he felt as if he were hallucinating at times, and I know that feeling.  He has just picked up one of those new word processors (this is the early 1980′s, remember), and he starts playing with it, knowing he can’t write anything, but thinks he can get a feel for the machine.

So he’s typing some words, and then deleting them.  And typing strings of works, and reworking them, and deleting them.  In that moment it hits him:  What if I typed in my wife’s name and hit delete?  Would she vanish?

That story became The Word Processor, which was published in the January 1983 issue of Playboy (which I read, because I did read Playboy for the articles before I worked there), and was later published in one of his short story collections.

See?  A cold is no reason to stay away from your craft.  If nothing else, you can work on other things.

Though typing, “I so want Christina Hendricks’ body,” and hitting Enter doesn’t seem to be doing anything.  Maybe if I try it again . . .

 

The Fallacy of the Commonplace

After a week of living through one of the worst colds I’ve known in a long time, I seem to be back to “normal”.  Of course, today I head back into the office, and I’m likely to walk out of there with sniffles and various illnesses, so by this evening I’ll know for sure if I’m really over what I had.

I still have an infection in my right ear, ’cause there is this incessant ringing there, and everything sounds muffled.  I’ll put a warm cloth on that this afternoon once I’m home; perhaps that will help.

At least I can get back to my writing . . .

I’m the first to say that after finishing the edit on Echoes, I had no idea what to do next.  Oh, I know:  I have a couple of things I could get into, but I feel as if I’m not ready to go there.  It’s like my mind is just–locked up, or something.  The creativity button, or whatever I need to push to get things going, isn’t working very well.

In the meantime, I’ve delved back into Her Demonic Majesty for one last polish.  And man:  am I glad.  I’ve run it through a couple of passes already, and I know I’ve caught a lot of things, but this time around I’m really looked to get it rewritten the way I want–

Only a chapter and a half in and I’ve done the rewriting.

Don’t take this to mean it’s a bad book, or that I’m totally tearing it the hell up because it’s totally sucko.  On the contrary:  I’m making it better.

There was a comment made on Facebook the other day–oh, there’s something new, right?  It really started in jest, I know.  Someone was making a comment about their NaNo Novel, and they said something like, “I didn’t plot it out and it’s the best; next!”  I joked back, “I did plot out my NaNo Novel, and it’s the best!  Next!”

As the Internet abhors any semblance of mock happiness, some wag posted back, “Who says it’s the best?”  Oh, sure:  the ultimate slam.  Your stuff is the best?  Prove it!

I’ll tell you who thinks it’s the best–

Me.

That’s something I wouldn’t have said over a year ago.  I couldn’t bring myself to say anything good about my work.  I would give you every reason why it was going to fail, or why it was going suck harder than the proverbial hooker with a mile-long garden hose.

These days, I can step back and look at a work with a fairly critical eye.  I might feel that finding a home for it is going to be hard, because it might be out there a bit, but I don’t the story sucks because of that.  No, it might need a little editing, but the story does not suck.

I can tell when it is starting to suck–

When I dismiss it from my head.

Because if I don’t feel like I should think about it any more than necessary, then it’s not worth doing.  But if the ideas are still there; if I’m getting something I just can’t shake, then I know it will see the light of day.

Which reminds me . . . on the drive here yesterday I thought up a new way of doing magical fireballs.

Wait until Annie hears about this.

Thunderstorm Interludes

I can understand Thor being happy his movie made a butt-load of cash over the weekend, but that doesn’t give him a right to keep me awake most of the night.

The weather around my Real Home has been crazy most of the weekend, but since about 5 PM Sunday afternoon, we kept getting thunder.  Not a lot, but it was becoming a very constant thing.  When I finally headed off to bed with eyes swollen from sneezing, sometime around 11 PM, the thunder was still there, off and on, like background music that the people down the street were playing in their back yard, and that you’d catch when the wind was right.

Then right at 12:30 AM, it just kicked it hard.  Thunder, lightening, and lots and lots of rain.  Enough to get me out of bed and having me checking the time (I always do that), then wandering off to the bathroom before finding my way back to a fitful sleep.

It was like that until I finally said, “Screw it,” and crawled downstairs for coffee at 5:20 AM.  Fall asleep, dream a little, wake up when the night time outside the bedroom window lit up like a Tesla Coil.  Real pain in the butt.

This whole weekend was a pain in the butt.  I’m coming up on being sick for almost a week, and I’m that point in the illness where I feel like I’m getting over it, then it comes back and reminds me that I’m wrong.  Saturday was weakness; yesterday was a whole lot of sneezing and coughing–and eyes swollen and sore.  This morning I thought, “Hey, this might be just about over,” then I was hit with massive sneezing.  Damn you, cold.  Damn you to hell.

I haven’t been able to do much writing at all.  I finished Echoes, and then . . . really, nothing.  As I just told someone on Facebook, since I haven’t been writing I’ve been going a little nuts, and last night I pulled out Her Demonic Majesty, and began doing the last pass polish on it.  I only made it through the first third of the first chapter, but I needed to do something . . . I needed to look at some words and get into a story.

And I ended up rewriting more than a few parts of the section of the chapter.  I haven’t actually looked at it in months, and as I read it, I was shaking my head.  No, no, no.  Parts of it felt very clumsy.  So it got a make over–one of the better, I hope.

Getting this last edit in will become my current project.  I have lots of notes to make for a couple of stories, and as much as I’d like to start on something new, I’m not there yet.  Research, baby:  that’s what I do.  So I still have that to do before I can really get into those stories.

But Majesty . . . I’ve been sitting on that for a while, and it’s time to finish it up.  Time to look for publishers.  Time to get it out there.  There’s no point in letting it collect electronic dust.

Maybe getting sick and taking a little time off is a good thing.  Because it’s given me time to think, and to suffer.  Well, the suffering I can do without, but thinking–always a good thing.

Just need to channel that into something that’s going to be good further down the line.