12

Back to work, summer style, doesn't actually feel like work when work-work looms. Did I mention I have to go back into the office tomorrow? Just for a minute of a meeting but it does make whatever work I did at home today feel more like summer-work than work-work which just reminds me 12 is a number that I should behold. 

1. Making sense is exhausting. Again, revising is so not pleasant. It's like work-work instead of summer work. Writing first drafts is summer work. Revising is like making sure your annual report gets turned in on time. I knew I had trouble waiting for me to fix. I had A Winter's Tale trouble. "Exit, pursued by a bear," literally. In the YA novel, there's a bear. He just shows up. Why? I don't remember. Does everything have to have meaning? I think it was for plot but I'm afraid I already have too much plot. What to do with the bear? I let him stay but I had to do a lot of surround story and back story and fore story to make it worth it. The bear himself was interesting. "She could almost make out his ears, which, in the zoo, seemed small and cute but here seemed as menacing as his snout. All his orifices were focused on Marie." But, really, are ears that interesting? 

2. Then I had to make sense of this essay inside the book that is a book pretending NOT to be a series of essays because every agent in the world says, "Essay collections are very difficult to sell." The essay is about cautionary tales and just IS a series of cautionary tales as told to Max and Zoe and perhaps it lacks the ears of the bear story. I mean, it's a bit long-winded. 5000 words? On cautionary tales? I should probably cut it.  And there were typos. And there were gun stories, sex stories and fire stories that really don't relate nearly as much as ears do to bears and bears were already acting very "exit, pursued by." So maybe I fixed nothing today. Or maybe it's all good. Who knows? It's revision! A crap shoot of system that by tomorrow will need to be shot fully with more crap.

3. Speaking of bears, the hummingbirds, of which there were 1000 the other day, have somehow moved on. I'm not sure if it's our food, although we just gave them part 2 of what they drank down in 4 hours the night before. Maybe our neighbor, who has returned from her travels, has refilled her many feeders and they have all flocked to her (What's a group of hummingbirds? A charm of hummingbirds. A troubling of hummingbirds. A hover of hummingbirds. Oh my. All the emotions of the day at once). Maybe the Rufous hummingbird scared all the other ones away and he drinks tiny sips surreptitiously at night. Maybe they got sick of me typing about them. Maybe the bear scared them off.