The Attempted Organization of Thought

I know what I want to do, but the days seem to fly by without me somehow doing it. I’m in major need of sitzfleisch.

A week or two ago, my friend Caitlyn said she didn’t know how I could write, because she had “the concentration of a gnat.” But I was under a deadline; I had to write. And also, since I’d been under two deadlines for several months, I had momentum behind me.

Now, I’m in a new place. We flew out of New York the day Broadway went dark. We’d meant to just come out for a visit while Carlos had his Tuscon Festival of Books, but that got canceled three days before, and I already had my ticket out. So he bought a new one for himself, and we thought we’d make a bit of a vacation about it.

And now it looks like we’re here until May! We’re so lucky to be here. What a wonderful thing, to be in the house I grew up, with my mother, and my brother and sister-in-law, and their housemate. We’d initially camped out in the front room, but when we saw we’d be extending our stay, we took over the “yoga/meditation” room, which happens to have been my bedroom as a teenager. So that’s strange and kind of wonderful.

My mom bought us foam mats for the floor, so between those and the sleeping bags, we’re snug. We packed for a week, so we’re doing laundry a lot, but again, all of this is something to be grateful for.

I miss our apartment in Queens, and I’m worried about our friends, and–O Vanity–I’m starting to dream about dresses. Ball dresses. Froofy dresses. Fancy dresses.

(This happened also when I was living for a year with friends in the Chicago area as I was saving up to move out east. Most of my stuff was in storage, so I was living out of a suitcase. After a few weeks of this, I started dreaming “plague dreams” on the regular: wherein 99.9% of the global population died, and I could go into department stores and just take any dress I wanted off the rack.)

(This told me something about myself that didn’t necessarily surprise me but that I didn’t exactly want to know either. The dreams did eventually stop when I finally moved to Rhode Island and had access to my full wardrobe again.)

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Thankfully, I’m not dreaming plague dreams these days. (Who needs that when we have the news?) Just, apparently, my subconscious wants to go to the prom or something. Who knows?

Anyway, what I really want to do is revise Fiddle.

I have my outline with me–which is a big win, since I don’t always carry that notebook with me, and it was a handwritten outline. I have my computer. I have time. All of this warm, sequestered, quiet, stay-at-home time. I even have a door that closes. I just have to use it.

Fiddle takes place in the same world as Desdemona and the Deep does, but it’s a good 75 years or so later, in the equivalent of that world’s 1980’s. You can imagine the hair. And the music. And the computer games. Space travel. And sentient demon ships. And an orca mafia. And a drowned city. And a protagonist who’s both just kind of a girl and brown recluse spider at the same time. Because that’s how goblins roll.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I have the revise the danged thing. And after that–who knows what it’ll be?

Plans. I have them. Sitzfleisch? We’ll see.