Always a Disaster for Me

I stayed up a little too late, which is always a disaster for me, as it inevitably leads to hours of no sleep or waking up. I blame Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham (writing together as James S.A. Corey); I was finishing re-reading book one of The Expanse, and even though I’d read it before, it was long enough ago that I didn’t quite remember how the final great sequence played out, so I kept trying to keep my eyes open, and it was just a mess. I finally gave up on sleeping solidly around 3:30 a.m., and actually finished reading it then.

Didn’t want to get out of bed, but luckily, I’d brought my notebook and colored pencils to the bedroom, so I put on a dumb TV show re-run (Private Practice, to my shame), and was productive, sketching out and defining the layout for Chelliah House in the new novel. It’s a big house, so I didn’t lay it ALL out — I just gestured towards the guest rooms, and there are probably some pantries and toilets and such that I could put in, and I skipped the entire second floor, where the master suite is. But we don’t go up there in this book, so that’s okay.  Having it sketched should help me avoid errors as my characters stumble about.

It’s funny too — I pulled out a notebook I haven’t used for a while, not since we were in Tulum (which I know, because of the Frida Kahlo cover) for Thanksgiving in 2018. And I hadn’t done much in it, but I’d sketched a little bit of a planet, and started a bit of backstory, and it’s also part of the Jump Space universe, if for the other series that I’ve only started drafting. Nice to have a little unity to the book.  Makes me feel like I’m on the right track.

That took me to 5:30 or so, and then breakfast (I actually made an omelette with goat cheese to have with buttered toast, very industrious of sleepy me, but I felt the need for something fortifying), and then I went to go water the garden, which I’d meant to do yesterday and forgotten. My garden is a little parched in general, I’m afraid, but somehow, it mostly survives.

I think it might be time for second breakfast. Watering the plants makes a girl hungry.

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