I had a rubbish night on Monday and ended up sitting up for 2 hours in the dark waiting for a reflux to subside. Normally I’d read, but I was tired and I didn’t want to bother with the new glasses I’m supposed to wear all the time if I want to get used to them.
When I woke up a couple of hours later to let the dog out, my hip and leg were in a whole lot of pain. I was late getting up as well. Add that to the rubbish day I had on Tuesday, I was waaaaay behind by the end of it.
Two things fell by the wayside: my morning pages and the client edit. The dog walk was shorter too, and I didn’t hang up the washing in the machine. So I guess that makes it three things that fell by the wayside…
When the poet got back from his trip, he was very tired. He’d been driving for a couple of hours in high wind and squally rain. He was so tired that we had a takeaway for our tea. We fell into bed Tuesday night, and slept in yesterday. So already, there I was, another hour behind.
We both had a hot drink and I fed the dog, then when the poet went off to work again, I did Tuesday’s morning pages. I could have skipped the day and gone straight to Wednesday, but that would have told my brain that it was okay to skip a day and I’d end up skipping more and more in the future. So I made myself do Tuesday’s morning pages on Wednesday morning, and I promised myself I’d do Wednesday’s later on in the day.
Over the past 3 days, my writing pages have been about one character study. It’s someone I used to know who had so many different facets to her personality that to lump them all together into one new character would make it blatantly obvious who the character might be based on. So at the end of Tuesday’s session (on Wednesday!), I stripped these facets out into a list of 6, including the way she looked as #6.
That’s 6 basic character traits from just one person, made into 6 new characters. Now I need to choose which one will be a murder victim, which one will be a perpetrator, which one will just be a piss-take, sorry, caricature, and so on. Perhaps they’ll all be piss-takes…
My character Marcie Craig is a bit voicy about the people she knows, to the extent that one reader thought a character was based on him, one (expert) reader was based on him, and another (expert) reader asked me if I’d do one based on her in a future volume. I’d taken just one characteristic from each of the males and put them into characters that were nothing like them, so I know I didn’t do that particular job well enough.
I did it again for the first Stevie Beck story, but this time I spread the characteristics out across several characters and I think I made a better job of it. Sometimes, some of these characteristics are just too good not to use in one form or another. And now I have another person I didn’t particularly like who wasn’t particularly nice to me who I can kill 6 times over, and slowly if I want to…
(Gosh, I hope MI5 aren’t reading this…or CID…But in case you are, this is for character work in fiction!) (I’ve already seen the FBI on here, and have no idea why…if it’s really them and not a spoof URL, of course, which is more likely…)
I wonder who I can pull apart in the next few morning pages…Sooo cathartic.
Once I’d done my morning pages, I put the washing through again on a quick wash, so it wouldn’t smell mildewy, I emptied the dishwasher, and I took the dog for another short walk. He was a million times better this time than he had been the day before. Most of the time he is a really good puppy. But when he’s got one on him, boy do we have to watch out.
I was still behind, but this time I decided to make sure I touched everything at least once in a bid to catch up and stay on top of it all again. I checked that my monitor was in a comfortable downward position for the new glasses. It was. Much better, in fact. And then I started work.
First job at my desk was sharing yesterday’s blog post to Medium and Instagram. If I schedule them to post, I have to wait until they’ve been posted before I can share them there. Patreon gives me a nice little graphic I can use on Instagram, but the Medium story is just a straight import. All I have to do is resize the illustration and add the caption.
Next job was starting today’s blog post while it was all still fresh, and I resolved to keep on top of it throughout the day. As I was typing, I realised that Night Crawler is 30 years old this year. I wrote it of an evening over 3 months while I worked a full-time job during the day. For the next 14 years it did the rounds before I eventually published it myself in 2010. Marcie’s had 4 new short stories since then, but it’s about time I pulled my finger out with The Beast Within.
And I will. It’s part of this year’s new writing programme as well as the writealong for the project management books.
Over my midday breakfast, I started a new writing workshop and watched Week 1 of the ‘classic’ WMG workshop Information Flow. I hope I’m taking it all in. I think I am, and I’m noticing things in the book reviews too to include as a direct result of all this learning.
After I’d eaten, I turned back to the client edit, working on that for the rest of the day. Then I moved into the living room so I could do the day’s real ‘morning’ pages.
This post appears on Words Worth Writing, Medium and Patreon.
I hope you feel better. I hate disrupted sleep.
Good for you, on the character work, and yay, NIGHT CRAWLER! I remember when you were first working on that.