Well here we are.  Fall, again.  Nerd Child is back to school, Flower Child goes back on Monday, and Man Child is fully immersed in his year up North.  Yeah, yeah, technically the season doesn’t begin until the 21st, but I needed a jacket when I walked the beasts last night, and it isn’t much warmer this morning.

Today was my last day to sleep in.  Luckily, Big Senile Dog was on the case and woke me up early.  Just because.  Fine.  Got up, made coffee, went to sit on my terrace with my WIP, and he began barking again.  This time to let me know Little Incredibly Stupid Dog had peed all over the floor.  Out of paper towels.  FYI for the fringelings, it takes an entire box of tissues to clean up the pee of an 11 pound dog.

I’d like to say my posts have been sporadic over the past couple of months because I’ve been busy having a fabulous time and upgrading my life.  Nope.

I’d like to say posts will be more regular now that it’s back to school season in Fringeland.  Probably not.

The  WIP I’ve been talking about, Astonishing?  To work on it, I have to tap into my inner muck.  The stuff I like to stomp down and pretend isn’t there.  You know, so I get out of bed in the morning and do things like make coffee and clean up dog pee.  Despite the slow progress, I think I’ve got the bones of a good book.  Honest.  Distorted for maximum impact, wrapped up in fiction, and tied with the bow of story, of course.

Honest in a different way than Mrs Fringe, where I try to serve each platter of honesty spiced with enough humor to make it palatable for the amuse-bouches that equal blog reading.

Switching gears between the two is hard as hell.

When this summer began I was feeling, dare I say it? hopeful.  This was not going to be a summer of death, I was going to relax, destress, and take concrete steps to make changes in my life.  Let myself feel and plan.  What the fuck was I thinking?  I want my layer of numb back, please.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been poked by that little thing I like to call reality.   I’ve been grateful to have Astonishing.  For me, it is a refuge, my pretend world where I can take the shit that is too often life and manipulate it, tweak the character’s actions, reactions, and responses until I get a result I’m ok with.  Something satisfying.

Tricky, this.  This tapping into enough real to create honest fiction, while trying to get back a nice fat layer of numb.

Maybe tonight while I’m out at Friday Night Madness they’ll have some numb on tap.