Rudbeckia on a neighbor’s front steps.
Today was the kind of hot where you step out onto the shady front porch and think, Oh, that’s a nice summer day, what a breeze! and then you take a second step out into the sun and your skin starts sizzling while the rest of you melts like a candle from the inside out.
Anyway it wasn’t the awesomest day of the week to have Everything To Do And Everywhere To Go, is what I’m saying.
Writing things: Morning pages ride again! Had some thoughts on re-tangling with Nasrin’s story and also Sister Milo and the Archive. I really want to write some Archive stories. Weaponized space library, ho! Also had some excellent, congeal-y novel-thoughts.
A thing that’s happened repeatedly to me in the process of drafting this thing is that the original monstrosity of it in my brain was this great sprawling complicated thing and I spent probably literal years thinking That’ll never sell, this isn’t commercial, this is too weird and tangled and viciously pruning it back, but now every time I run into a problem with it the answer is usually: put back one of those weird things you cut. So, okay, I will just let it sprout its luscious weirdnesses everywhere.
(It’s not, sadly, because I’ve had any kind of artistic epiphany about Owning Your Weird or anything like that; usually it’s because I run across another work I admire that’s done something just analogous enough that I feel like I’m granted permission.)
(I do need to work on Owning My Weird, clearly.)
Daily things: Took W. to visit the Montessori school for herself in the morning, and then had to spend a while cajoling her out of the Montessori school — she wanted to stay in the reading loft, and when I got her down from there she wanted to pet the chickens — but I prevailed by promising a trip to the farm. So then we went to the farm en route to the grocery store, and then the grocery store, and then we went for a walk and then to the playground and then to gymnastics, and at some point in among all of this I did three loads of laundry and two of dishes and made supper. (Green chili braised chicken with yellow rice and refried beans and corn on the cob.)
W’s in school tomorrow (she’s been complaining all evening that it won’t be the Montessori school, she wants to go there now), and I’m debating whether I oughtn’t try to take the laptop and work someplace outside the house for a change. I’m so distractible at home.
wren wallis 