Writer Down!

Okay, not at the moment.  At the moment, writer up!  Writer well rested!  Writer not in too much pain!

But Friday night, after a day on the con floor at Bascon, I was texting and walking, when it is a well known fact that I have problems doing EITHER of those actions well independently, and I was also talking to my companion, Julianne.

And then I was falling.  And then I was on the ground, while Julianne said, “Okay.  You’re down.  Hang out there for a while.  Take stock.  Make sure you’re okay.  I’ve got time.”

For the record?  In case you ever see a large woman take a fall, I personally prefer this approach.  Why?  Because it gave me time to assess all my owies, decide they wouldn’t kill me, and then get up without crying. Anyway, I got up, thought, “Everything hurts,” and then reassured my companion that I would be okay and saw her off to her car.

Then I went up to my hotel room, stopped off at the ice machine, and cursed the fucking hotel because there was no ice.  I sat down to write, took two advil, dozed off snoring over my computer, and then got up really early in the morning because A. my wrist and shoulder hurt, and B. I needed to get a move on on my frickin’ manuscript.  (Since I was alone in a hotel room, I figured I should make some hay–and I did!)

Anyway, so the next day?  Went worse.  I slammed my pinky in the bathroom stall because I was grabbing with the wrong hand, the ace bandage I’d cadged from the cute-n-useless at the front desk kept making my shawl shed, and, horror of horrors on a business trip, I got a badly timed, bitchy, overbearing visit from everyone’s least favorite Aunt Flo.

Mate was supposed to show up Saturday night.  And he did.

Have you ever been so happy to see someone that you almost cry?  I have.  When we lost Chicken at the San Francisco zoo when she was seven–yup.  When we lost Zoomboy at a VERY busy Monterey Aquarium a couple of years ago.  There were tears.  When I was in a car accident about ten years ago, I was BEGGING for a phone (with my neck in a stationary brace) so I could call Mate and let him know I was okay.  Suddenly he was looming over me saying “Why do you need a phone?”  I almost cried.

I turned around and he was walking into the restaurant, still in his coaches outfit, wet from the rain, and I almost cried.  It had nothing to do with the romantic evening we’d planned and everything to do with having an owie day… just an owie fucking day, and he drove three hours in the rain because I had an owie fucking day.  And I honest to Goddess teared up.

So I don’t have a picture of the book coming out on Wednesday–I will on Wednesday because I’ll be on my regular computer then–but it’s called It’s Not Shakespeare.  And I don’t write Shakespeare, right?  I’ve never had pretensions to writing Shakespeare.  But I write romance, and I’m really proud of that.  When I’m writing a couple, I want to write a couple that, after nearly 25 years together, when one of them shows up after an owie day, the other one gets a little verklempt.  Because to me, that’s romance, and that makes me happy, and I went the rest of the world to, for just a minute, be that happy.

Because that’s what Mate does for me:-)