A rainy Saturday is the perfect day to write. Unfortunately yesterday I had to attend a work event. Yes, it was outside, and mostly tented, but truly it was miserable. The tent sucked. The parking sucked. The traffic sucked. I am sure there was a place to pee, but I chose not to venture there.

My second novel, Forever Falling, is nearing the end of first drafting. My characters and I have about 10,000 more words to journey together, before I let them rest awhile. Shit is getting real, as they say, in this land of fiction.

This has been an excellent writing week. Two or three pivotal, very challenging, scenes are finally taking shape. When they started to unfold, the action was fairly clear, but the internal and external dialog were a bit muddled. I wasn’t nailing it. I wasn’t getting near enough to it. I was seeing it, but not feeling it. Then my week got weird.

I was having some fluttering in the area of my heart. It was absolutely nothing but still required an EKG, which failed after three attempts. It reported that my pacemaker is functioning perfectly. No, I do not have a pacemaker, but I appear to be a cyborg. This all required me to share way more of my anatomy with my slightly too cute above the neck doctor, than I typically choose too. Topless horror.

Then there was the annual celebration at work. Suffice to say I was standing in the middle of 160 sitting co-workers taking photos. My dress wrapped my foot and you can guess the rest. There are two ways to go from there, you can cry and run out of the room or understand that you have a captive audience and perform some standup. I chose the latter and while my material was off the cuff, it wasn’t terrible. My newest Facebook friend deemed me the next Jennifer Lawrence. Somewhat of a triumph. Still miserably stressful.

And then writing went to a very different level. Oddly this week I have been writing a humiliating experience for my male main character, Callum. Then the great work face plant happened and Callum’s feelings of shame and embarrassment became much more accessible. He was exposed (much like my breasts) and degraded (much like looking up at 160 co-workers from the floor). The timing on this was fantastic.  As much as I like writing from beautiful landscapes and listening to the pounding of the surf, there is something to be said for inserting the shitty day to day into the lives of your characters.

Long live the bullshit. It keeps this land of make believe more real.