Salad Rolls of Fate, Intervened

I meant to spend the weekend finishing HOOD‘s Season Two zero draft, and possibly knocking off a chunk of Finder’s Watcher as well, but unfortunately Fate (in the form of a couple salad rolls, I suppose) intervened, and I spent Saturday night with a rather violent bout of food poisoning.

To be absolutely fair, it might not have been the salad rolls, but they were the only thing consumed in the right timeframe. Well, there was some cake a bit later, but… anyway, the point is, Saturday night was the kind of party nobody ever wants to have.

Except maybe the dogs, who were extremely excited at the break in routine, and wanted very much to get their noses into whatever I was producing from the top end (Mum is a magical food-making machine!) while not quite so enchanted with anything produced from the, erm, the other end. (Mum, that… doesn’t seem right…) Additionally, when I collapsed halfway between loo and bed–mostly because why bother trudging all the way back to pillows and sheets when I was just going to be back in the loo posthaste–they took turns nosing and snuggling me, either to encourage me to get up so the predators didn’t think I was weakened or to see if maybe I had produced more magical food.

In other words, it was an experience, and I spent most of Sunday staring blankly at whatever task was in front of me. There’s never an opportune time to get food poisoning, but I suppose it was lucky that I’ve been working ahead on just about everything. I would have prepped Soundtrack Monday and the final post for my NaNo series yesterday, but I was having trouble stringing words into coherent clauses, let alone sentences. I did get the red sauce and focaccia for the week done, since I’d spent most of Saturday (before the cyclone hit) doing prep work, so everything was to hand and easily done.

Consequently I’m feeling rather low this morning. Physical misery puts a pall over everything, and I’m tender in every direction from my midsection. There’s two scenes left to write in Season Two, but I can’t decide just what Robin Hood should be caught doing. Murder (utterly justified)? Theft (for a good cause, of course)? Something else? He isn’t talking, which doesn’t surprise Maid Marian one bit, so I suppose I might have to send Guy of Gisbourne in to irritate Robb into making a move. Sub rosa, of course, since Giz is already occupied in escaping an exploding spaceship.

I should note that characters have a funny dual existence inside my head. On the one hand, there’s the story; on the other, they’re all at a round table inside my head, jostling and discussing and telling different lies to each other. Sometimes one has to set a character against themselves or dangle something they want very badly before they’ll start talking. It’s not enough to know what happens next, I need to know why, and sometimes with a cagey character, I’m forced to play dirty.

Anyway. I should make a list, otherwise nothing will get done today; yet I don’t want to because I’m pretty sure only half of what I’d put on the list will get done at all, for no other reason than I’m still not feeling quite myself. Better than nothing, I suppose.

Off I go, chickadees. I hope your weekend was less… interesting… than mine.