No Ten Tuesday
There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
~ Ernest Hemingway
That is another take on the famous quote by Gene Fowler. So this morning of nothing to do I sit at the keyboard and bleed on it. Literally, it seems. I tried peeling my thumb with the potato peeler, and can’t get the bleeding to end.
But fortunately, the only key that thumb is used on is the [space bar]. But I do need it for everything else I do, it seems.
It is humid, but much cooler this late August morning, and I can feel the weakening sun as it backlights the leaves on the acacia tree in yellows and green, and continues on to dapple patches of yellow on my little porch garden.
I wrote and wrote and wrote last week, then reached an impasse in the story that I cannot get around. Female competiveness. I know so little about the dynamics of that in the boy-meets-girl part of the story, but it is integral. The mavens say that when you reach a stalemate like that to not attempt to tell the reader what is going in in the characters mind, but to simply describe the action.
Nowhere does the difference in the wiring of men and women show as much as it does in the dialogue between them. I have caught out several women writers who were writing from a masculine viewpoint on this. Men do not often dialogue in their heads after they have decided on a course of action.
In this slightly pornographic tale, I need to get the woman from casual interest into a fully developed relationship overnight, and nothing seems to move the girls faster than to have some competition. Not so much that they say to hell with this, however.
I have a circle of wet, brown eyes watching me this morning. Snookums has been outside with them throwing the ball, but now that she is on the treadmill, she has temporarily lost her allure, and I alone am the one who still has possibilities at this precise moment in time. Dogs be fickle creatures.
And my pots outside are needing water. The sweet potato vines need three waterings a day now that they have matured. I think next year I’ll rig up an automatic watering system. I do have a hose reel on the porch that makes the chore simple. Just step out in a minimum of clothes, grab the sprinkler wand, and fill up five containers.
And all this has taken a cup of coffee, and I need yet another, so … good morning!
Rusty's Armory 