Stacking the Deck

Okay...here's the plan. I am going to create the perfect writing environment for myself tomorrow and dedicate the day to working on my novel. Yes. The novel and nothing but the novel. No tech writing, my freelance customers will have to sit on their thumbs for a spell. No work on my flash writing class, even though I'm falling behind. No searching and fearless inventories. Nada, niente, nuttin. Just the novel.

I will rise early and drive to Seattle. Yes. I can drive now. I replaced the broken iPod and just finished synching it with my iTunes, so it will be okay to get in the car and go somewhere. When I got in my car this morning and the iPod made a screeching noise, I looked at it and saw that it actaully had an unhappy face on it! :( "This is no time to be cutsey, Apple," I thought, as I turned the car off and returned to my laptop. The apple support page for iPod confirmed my fear that I had experienced a hardware failure.

Here were my choices. Cancel my vacation. Don't go to the roomofonesown writer's retreat at the Ghost Ranch in New Mexico next month. Just buy a few half gallons of ice cream in assorted flavors and surrender to life's terms in my own small way. Or, I could name this unfortunate event an emergency and bring out the tools reserved only for emergency measures...My Credit Card!

The Nano is not like the iPod, in that it only holds 4 gigs. Who would ever think that my music and my audio books would fill it to capacity? I have about a quarter of a gig left. But I'm almost through listening to Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer. I read it when it first came out and was intrigued when I saw that the audio version was narrated by the author. My audio reading list is growing out of proportion now that I'm working from home. I used to get a lot of reading done when I commuted. (Is it reading if you listen to it?) I have four books and a stack of the New Yorker to listen to.

Anyway, this brings me back to my writer's morning in Seattle tomorrow. I will be able to go only because the iPod disaster was averted through the use of the emergency-only credit card.

So, I shall go to the Panama Hotel, order a pot of Earl Grey with Lavender tea and sit at one of their wicker tables with a notebook and work on my novel. There will be no butterscotch for those who let three days go by without working on their novels! Tsk tsk.