A Sad Day

I woke up this morning like it was any other Thursday.  I heard the garbage trucks rumbling down the street as I went across the house.   I made coffee and did my usual stuff and was working on WRITING A WRONG, when the phone rang.  My husband answered it in another room. And then a few minutes later her came into the kitchen and told me a detective was on the phone.  He was calling to tell me that my brother had died.

A neighbor had noticed that he hadn’t taken his trash can out as he always did and when they looked the window saw that he was lying on the ground.   He was already gone.  No sign of foul play and the medical examiner would determine the cause of death.  They’d had to break in the door.  The detective was very nice and apologized for telling me over the phone, but then he was on the other side of the country.

It was a shock but I had to pull myself together to start dealing with things.  And now I have to fly across the country and take care of everything with no idea what I’m going to be walking into.

All of it would be hard any time, but with the virus even harder.  

We always got along, though we haven’t really been close for years, but we knew each other was there.  I’d call him when he was going through something that worried him and just listen. He’d call me when some disaster struck near me to make sure I was okay.  And now no more.

Late Again

Yes, I'm late. I admit it. But I'm definitely losing track of which day is which while staying home so much.

But I am staying busy--with my writing.  And dog walking.  And occasional exercising in a nearby park with a few friends--as long as we stay far apart and wear masks.

So maybe next week I'll think about posting here in a more timely manner.

How about you? Are you keeping track of which day is which?

My Morning

It’s day whatever since this whole virus lock down thing started.  I’m lost in a dream that I’m in downtown L.A. in line at See’s Candy and when I get to the front it turns out they don’t have any assorted chocolates.  I leave the candy shop and have no idea how to get from downtown L.A. to Tarzana.  I find a transit information booth run by a bunch of hipster guys.  They’re no help.  They think Tarzana is near Costa Mesa. For anyone not in Southern California, the two places are probably 50 miles apart.  The hipsters send me to a restaurant called Dough.  The people are very nice and say they’ll help me figure out what bus to take, but they get confused by all the maps and charts they have.

I get back to Tarzana, but only by waking up.  The dream leaves me feeling groggy and I go to the kitchen thinking about a nice cup of coffee. There’s something else on my mind.  I’ve been working on a proposal for another series for awhile and the beginning sucks.  It’s strange, but if I can get the first paragraph right, all else seems to follow.  In the back of my mind, probably when that dream was going on, a new beginning popped into my mind.  I think it will work and the rest of the first paragraph is suddenly there too.  I want to write it down before I forget while I drink that coffee.

 One of the cats likes to sit in the kitchen sink and drink water from the faucet.  It’s the same place I rinse out the coffee pot and fill it with water. He sees me coming across the house and he races me to the sink.  He wins.  I turn the water on a trickle.  While he’s drinking, I see the canned cat food my son put out for them the night before and it is now covered with ants.  It’s trash day and the garbage cans are all out by the street.  I’m not dressed so the yard is as far as the ant covered cat food goes for now.

Inside there are ants all over the floor looking for the cat food.  I spray them down with my trusty bottle of water and peppermint soap.  But now the floor is slippery and I slide my way to the kitchen table. The cat has had his fill and vacates the sink.  I get up and rush across the kitchen forgetting about the wet floor.  I slide and leave footprints.

While the coffee drips into the pot, I get back to the kitchen table.  I always have different size yellow pads there, but can only find a small one.  No matter, I ‘ll simply use more pages.

As I’m writing, I notice ants on the sleeve of my night gown and I realize that as I was dealing with them, some of them had jumped on when I’d been doing my clean up.  I hand squished them and they gave off a nasty kind of smell.  They kept coming and soon I noticed errant ones walking across the paper I was going to write on. In the meantime the coffee finished dripping and I grabbed a cup.

Finally, finally I grabbed my pen and started to write down the first line and then the lines after seem to tumble off the pen onto the page. As I thought, once I had that first paragraph, more followed and I saw how the story would come together.  And now to get it all in the computer without any more ant encounters.

This Week's Writing and More

My writing was a bit different this week.  I turned in the Harlequin Romantic Suspense manuscript I had been working on.  And then I started on the new one, another in the Colton series--for a new miniseries that will start being published next year.

 

I have three HRS stories currently in the works, but don't have the publication dates yet for any of them. But that's okay. Something to look forward to.

 

So what else am I doing besides writing?  Well, dog walking, for one thing. Because we have a nice size yard, we haven't always taken our dogs for walks since they can exercise there. But now? Dog walks every day!  They love it--we can tell how much they're looking forward to it by their barks when we're getting ready to go. And we also see a lot more neighbors walking, from near and not so near. A lot more people are exercising in the same way, some with and some without dogs along, some with and some without masks. It's fun yelling hi from across the street.

 

I also had a Killer Characters post up this week where I did a book giveaway, as did everyone else there this month. Now all I have to do is figure out when I'll get to the post office to mail it!