It’s déjà vu all over again.
Okay, so I slept in this morning. I had the day off, but my wife had to work, so I didn’t have anyone asking me about my completely neglected honey-do list. Well, I puttered around the downstairs office, reading e-mail, checking the news, etc. Then I decided to get cleaned up (shower, shave, etc.) so I could eat with my wife when she came home for lunch. We still had sandwich leftovers, so I fixed a ham, salami, pepperoni, and provolone sandwich. (Sans tomato this time, since I ate the last slices yesterday.)
Anyway, after my lovely wife headed back to work, I came downstairs to work on Nereids, Ch12. But then I got derailed. I guess I wasn’t really in the mood to write, since I checked the latest Digg headlines. For those of you who don’t know the site, Digg is like crack for techies—we literally can’t look at just one article header. And I got sucked in, Big Time ™.
After a few semi-random articles, I started reading one about Wikipedia: The Six Sins of the Wikipedia. The comments on Digg led me to the response from a Wikipeidan. Now, two of my very good friends (guys in my game group) are big Wikipedia critics. So I constantly hear how much they distrust the site. Personally, I kinda like it. So I wanted to read both sides of the controversy.
The “Six Sins” article is written by a guy with an obvious grudge. Worse, he doesn’t cite any examples of the problems he outlines. The response is a bit less lopsided, but it has a pro-Wikipedia bias, obviously.
Then I started reading the background on the guy who wrote the screed against Wikipedia. It was a lot of interesting stuff that I’ll let you read for yourself if you care to. In any event, it most definitely wasn’t what I needed to be working on: Nereids, Ch12.
So I shut down my browser, shut down my e-mail, and fired up M$ Word with Nereids and my outline. I started re-reading and editing, to get into the right frame of mind. Then I began work. I’d made two edits on the scenes from yesterday when the phone rang.
My first thought: Dad. Super.
I was wrong. It was Mom. Super-duper, I thought. All I want to do is write—finally—and my mom is calling.
I seriously contemplated not answering.
Before I tell you what I did—as if you don’t already know—a bit of background. My mother lives in Germany, with my brother and his kids. For those of you who don’t know, my brother is a US Air Force officer, whose current job is supporting the US Army. So instead of living in Air Force luxury in Ramstein, he lives at Army Group Europe HQ, in Heidelberg.
For those of you who don’t know how the military works, it’s simple: the Air Force live like kings. That’s it, pretty simple. The Army, on the other hand, live in tents and temporary bivouacs, or foxholes, or… worse. And when the Army deploys, their living conditions tend to go from mediocre to downright primitive. When the Air Force deploys, they have to change the shipping addresses on their Netflix accounts.
Now, why does my mother live in Germany with my brother? Well, my brother’s egg-donor of an ex-wife is such a worthless human being that he has full custody of their children. (I’m sure the egg-donor is a nice person, in some small, undefinable way, but she put my brother through hell, so she’s not on my Christmas list anymore. But I digress…)
One of the main reasons my brother has custody—aside from the fact that a long line of judges and psychologists recommended that the egg-donor ex-wife have only limited, supervised visits with her own children—is that my mother is a full-time Gram, and basically does everything a mother should do. So she raised me and my brother, and now she’s doing it for my brother’s kids. Great woman, my mother. (I mean that.)
Anyway, my mom doesn’t have a lot of adult interaction, so when she calls me, I know I’m going to end up talking to her for a while. (Are you seeing a trend here? My father is chatty… my mother is chatty… I write a lot… Get the picture?) So I answer the phone. After all, it might be my brother, and we’ll have a manly 10-minute conversation, short and sweet.
No such luck—it’s Mom.
She wants to start a new corporation, and she wants to buy a web domain. Network Solutions and their sanctioned highway robbery will cost her $35 a year, so I gleefully send her to GoDaddy, which will cost here something like $8 a year. Then I give her the specifics on how to buy a domain.
Now, my mother is also a smart woman (I have good genes), but she’s a different kind of smart than my father. She’s the woman who tried to convince us that the water in our pool was crooked. Yes, crooked. My father and I tried to explain to her that water seeks its own level, but she insisted that the water was crooked. We gave up that argument, dumbfounded.
Anyway, my mother’s smart in other ways. But those ways do not include computers. Oh, she can use one as long as she knows what she’s doing, but she’s not very comfortable figuring out new things for herself. She can send me kitschy Jacquie Lawson cards all day long, but she doesn’t know how to change her browser home page.
So I talked her through all the other things she wanted to do (my brother was out riding bikes with the kids, hence my mom had time to do things on the computer). Then she started chatting about… I don’t know what. I zoned out. It involved lots of things that I found interesting, but none that I found memorable. I’m more like my father, and my parents are divorced. Get the picture? I love my mom, but she drives me nuts sometimes.
When I finally tell her that I’m working on a project at home, she spends another fifteen minutes telling me about her and my brother’s plans for world domination (okay, not world domination, but the future). Now, I count these additional fifteen minutes as a minor victory of a sort. I’ve known my mother to keep the conversation going for another 30-45 minutes. I mean, there’s a reason she was a super successful Tupperware manager when I was a kid, and then a Top-100 account exec for FedEx after she and my dad divorced, and then a small business owner who rose to the top of her field. Yeah, my mom’s smart in different ways than my dad. One of those ways is people, and getting what she wants. So she got her fifteen minutes, and I count it as a victory on my part.
So, I hung up with my mom, but I still wasn’t in the writing mood. Go figure. Enter Digg. Again. Enter Google Video, from a link on Digg. Enter YouTube, also from a link on Digg. What better way to lose two hours than on user-submitted videos? Yeah, right.
Believe it or not, I finally took the YouTube needle out of my arm and closed my browser. When I finally started writing in earnest, things flowed. I didn’t feel uneasy at all about yesterday’s scenes. They still felt good, felt right. And today’s scenes flowed from them, coming in a good stream.
Unfortunately, my mother called two more times while I was mid-flow. The calls were far enough apart, and I managed to keep them short enough (thank God for the six-hour time difference between me and CET—Mom was up late, and she couldn’t talk long). So I didn’t lose my train of thought.
I got a lot done, but I didn’t have as much time to write, since my lovely wife was due home from work. But I still managed to hammer out 1,984 words, not including edits on yesterday’s 4,000. Chapter 12 is progressing nicely, and I’m about 40% done with it. I’ve had the final scene in mind for a while, so it should go quickly as well. And I have the epilogue in mind, so it should flow too.
I still have to revise Ch3, based upon my editor’s comments (an unusually high number of very insightful comments, too… most of his comments are insightful, but there are more of them this time). And I’m in the middle of editing Ch6 to send out to editing. Ch1 is final and in Ruthie’s Club’s hands. Ch2 is with the RC editor (for style), and should be back soon. Otherwise, I’m pretty close to reaching the “production line” stage.
And when I finish writing Nereids, I’ll take a short break and then begin SC-B4. Believe it or not, I’m eager to get to it, too. I’ve had a lot of B4 in my head for a long time, and it’s ready to see the light of day.
Fortunately, I’m all out of close relatives to call and interrupt my flow. But tomorrow is July 4, and I have 10 lbs of baby back ribs, a new Memphis rub (mmm-mmm, good!), and plenty of hickory chips. So I don’t think I’ll get much writing done. But I’ll have fun not doing it.
I hope you have fun not writing, too. 
- Nick
P.S. - For you barbecue afficionados, I’ll post my rub recipe in another post, maybe tomorrow.
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3 Responses to “It’s déjà vu all over again.”
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Again, you geek!
Nice to see some fellow geeks, though. I have to limit myself from following link after link, as well. *sigh*
Have a Happy 4th!
Your brother’s job is sort of the flip side of my Uncle Jimmy’s job when he was in the Armored Cavalry in Germany. He was stationed at Ramstein to try to keep things smooth between the Air Force and the Army. He retired several years ago as a Sergeant Major and got his degree from teh University of Maryland, Heidelberg Campus.
For a couple years prior to Desert Storm (George H.W.’s war) Uncle Jimmy was a receruiter for the NCO Organization in Europe. Them, not surprisingly, most of his target audience was no longer in Europe.
I’m not sure what he’s doing these days. He’s retired from the Army for many years, married to a German national, and has his masters degree from that same campus of the University of Maryland. I hope he’s simply enjoying the World Cup, but I’m not sure that he can. He was in Munich in ‘72.
Regards,
Jim
Your brother is an officer and living in a foxhole for quarters in Heidelberg? Uh…. have you been to or seen pictures of these quarters? My father was stationed in Heidelberg when it was home to EuCom Hq, mostly Army. We live in an apartment in Nathen Hale Village, only then it was called Kline America. The foxholes are rather nice.
Much nice than Navy housing, if you ever see any!
Carl
PS If you need to get your off the phone have him call me. We can talk T-28s I’ve got 200 hours in Bs and Cs.
PPS I hope you and your mother are using Skype.