The only problem with rolling out of bed early and reshuffling my morning routine is that it gives me a deep, desperate desire for second breakfast. The older I get, the more I think hobbits had the right damn idea.
I was having some thoughts about mansplaining, hypocrisy, and power this morning. It always used to puzzle me–why, for example, did my childhood abusers require a highly ritualized “submission” after a physical or verbal battering? It wasn’t enough that they had beaten a child into a semblance of submission, they also required a “kiss the ring” moment afterward. This seems common among toxic people, and I wonder about it a lot. Not as much as I used to–another thing about getting older is that I’m more likely to let such things remain in the “dunno why they do it, just know that if I see it, that’s the kind of person I’m dealing with.”
In other news, I woke up with Nik Kershaw playing inside my head. The ol’ skull radio has been flicking around a lot lately; not too long ago it was Wagner, then Shostakovich (like diamond mice, as Tanith Lee would say), then for some reason Taylor Swift, and now the 80s are rampaging through in a steady stream. I’ve learned to just let the brain do what it wills, even if it insists on Hall & Oates during the sacking of an elvish city. (Don’t ask me, I don’t know.)
Which there is more of planned for today. I might get to the section titled Naciel’s Run, which has been (again) in my head for over a year. I also need to let the villain speak a bit in Hell’s Acre, because we’re about to embark on the last blood-drenched ball played out in New Rome. We need to see how he reacts to the news not just of some assassinations, but also the attack on the secondary villain, who I thought was going to be the primary one for a long while.
The books like to surprise me. Which means I will need more tea. The good thing is that plenty of the minutiae of daily nitpicky meatsack-maintenance is out of the way. The bad is, I’m kind of exhausted and waiting for the small amount of caffeine in said tea to flog my grey matter into working.
Changing routines is always like that, though. Eventually this will settle into a new normal. For the moment, Boxnoggin is sprawled on my bed, snoring deeply and no doubt dreaming of chasing geese, my inbox is still on fire but it’s a slow creeping burn instead of leaping flames, and if the work for the day is massive at least it’s also clear-cut, and I know what needs to happen in every case.
So now we embark upon Monday, my beloveds. Oh, and there’s also a new tier over on my Patreon–if you’re interested in Friday night write-ins with yours truly, that is.
See you around.