What’s a writer to do?

I finally had a wonderful night’s sleep after three days of passable sleep. I woke from a odd dream where I was trying to make impossible things work only to be irritated that in my wakened state it no longer made sense to do the impossible…..it was darned dream after all. lying in bed afterwards trying to find motivation to get out of bed I thought of what seemed like a good way to proceed on writing a book….three books in fact. I wanted to keep them in my mind rather than dissipate my brainchild by listening to a couple hours worth of news. I did sit down with coffee first and listened to our State’s democratic Attorney General explaining the reasons he wrote a book about the George Floyd case. I commented to Claudia that I was very glad I had put Ellison’s lawnsign up when he was elected four years ago. Someone stole the sign when he ran for reelection so I put of a Simon sign someone had thrown nearby in my lawn instead. Simon is the democrat’s Secretary of State.

Then I put Claudia in a rare state of hysterics when I explained why I had woken up in the middle of the night and so exercised our newish rescue cat Orca that Orca pestered her until morning. I did my wordle at 3AM and before attempting to fall back asleep I peaked out the back window and saw an intruder on my lawn. Claudia laughed knowing I’d spent all yesterday building an insect skyscraper and cleaning my patio and that I had no interest in animals eating our garden. She asked if it was deer. It was a rabbit I told her. I told her how I opened the window and stuck my head out and made quiet but menacing noises to scare it off and failed miserably. I told her I’d flashed on and off the blinging klieg lights to unnerve the immobile animal/animals actually. I deduced that because it was spring I deduced courtship and the attendant menace to our garden of baby bunnies. I told her how I searched the room for something I could throw out the window at them finding only a couple yellow magic markers. I explained how when they were unfazed I had no choice but to go downstairs in my robe to chase them away. Each iteration of my battle raised more laughing. Finally I waved a rake at them and pounded it on the ground and after cornering one of them by my new fence drove it to dive under it to escape.

When I finished my tale I explained that I was motivated to write something and would be skipping news. Claudia looked wounded and indicated she had an appetite. I understood and asked if McDonalds would do. Yes, a McMuffin and coffee would be nice. I brought both back for each of us and added a cinnamon role for me for good measure. Then I went up to my office where I wrote down three books to be written successively and which might still the many years of itching my writing fingers had been enduring. Then I wrote out something of a chapter outline for the first of them. Then I wrote an Intro and two chapters greatly aided by pirating some of my 240 old Reader columns.

For my third chapter I wanted to add one about how it was I first got glasses. I thought it was a subject I had neglected for the Duluth Reader but thought I might find a version already written somewhere where in my blog. A quick search was unsuccessful but when I typed in “dialated eyes” in the search function a different column popped up. I enjoyed it. I thought it would be a good one to show one of my grandsons who has been reading my old columns. It had a lot of typos and I noticed it contained the possible promise of my coming back to it for editing. I decided it was worth editing now almost eight years later. So I made some improvements. Here it is: https://lincolndemocrat.com/?p=14949

Now I’ll make the same semi-promise I made about the post above. I may come back and edit this…….but I want to start my third chapter first……so I may never get around to this one. Years ago I calculated that there were 10 million words in the blog. A godawful lot of them have never been proofread or edited. That’s a lot of work.

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