Random

My love/hate relationship with Facebook continues.

It got really dark earlier–SUPER dark–and I thought a big storm was rolling in. We got drizzle. That’s a lot of drama for not much payoff. Sort of like Facebook.

If I venture out to take care of some errands, the bad weather payoff may come. I will then bitch about that, too.

I’ve been on the phone almost since I woke up trying to take care of scheduling things and returning calls, and each of these calls has been an exercise in frustration. (In fact, I’m on hold right now.) If businesses want to deal with me on the phone, then why is the person I need to talk to always unavailable or “the system is down” or the person I get on the phone has no idea what I’m talking about? Trust me, none of these contacts is with some call center in India. People just don’t have their shit together. Wait–is tonight the full moon? Or was it last night? Maybe I’m dealing with werewolves.

I swear a rat just fell past my window. Maybe it’s like those birds in Arkansas. Rats falling from the sky, John McCain saying nice things about Barack Obama, and me getting nine uninterrupted hours of sleep last night. What is up with the universe?

A Compound bouquet for you, photographed on sunnier days:

Soundtracking

On his blog, Jeffrey Ricker asks:

Here’s a question–or actually several: what music inspires you? Have you ever written anything inspired by a particular piece of music? Do you listen to music while you write?

Here’s my answer:

I do make mental and sometimes real soundtracks for the novels I work on. Off the top of my head: Three Fortunes involved a lot of R.E.M. and a bit of U2 (Kieran was Irish, after all). I listened mainly to George Michael while working on I’m Your Man because there’s a lot of yearning in his songs and in the novel. I not only listened to the Pet Shop Boys during the period when we wrote When You Don’t See Me, but their songs became our chapter titles and the band was special to Nick. A Coventry Wedding was all Beatles, all the time, and though a lot of Beatles songs are mentioned in the novel, there are also coded references to their songs or song titles. Here’s one: Jandy meets a crotchety old artist in the book whose name is Wayne Plochman. In reality, Plochman is a brand of mustard: thus, “Mean Mr. Mustard” from the album Abbey Road.

I’d probably need to reread the other books to remember what songs were inspiring me while I wrote.

I write in silence, usually. The exception to this is when Tim and I work in the same dwelling, because he always has music playing. So a lot of times I mentally connect songs to my mood when I was writing something, even though they didn’t necessarily inspire it or have anything to do with it.

Speaking of music… One regret I have is that we took a fragment of a song lyric out of It Had to Be You. Every time I hear the song, it makes me laugh because of the scene it evokes–and not using it cost the readers a laugh in a comic moment in the novel. We were beginners and afraid of being sued.

All that glitters…

One thing about a house where a lot of crafting happens: There’s always some glitter somewhere. I’ll see it on Guinness’s nose, Margot’s paw. There’ll be some on Tom’s shirt or my cheeks. It’s never really gone, even if I haven’t used glitter for months, because whenever I pull paints and canvases or fabrics out, there will always be a bit of glitter clinging to them, too.

So I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that right now, Tom and I keep finding magnetic words in odd places. He found a word on the living room floor. I found one in the bathroom sink. And yesterday, when I turned my silver Magnetic Poetry box around on my desk, I was reminded that someone I love has a free spirit and can NOT be boxed in.