When I have it in mind to do a project, it is all I can think about. It was like that with Homing, when I was writing the first draft, though in that case I was obsessed with the statistics of it, how many words I could write per hour, and how many hours per day, and how long I could reasonably put it off and still finish by the end of November. NaNoWriMo and all. My god, six years ago right now I was just being ribbed by a good friend about my character who didn’t seem to want to leave the house, the ghost who seemed to be hanging around the library and the wafer thin plot that didn’t seem like it was going to be able to bring them together at all. She laughingly suggested homing pigeons. Maybe it desperation, or maybe divine inspiration. Doesn’t matter. I bit, and here we are.

Anyhow, while Kev is out of town, I have been passing the hours and days and weeks with cunning plans involving furniture placement, reconditioning and repurposing. This, I could do forever and be happy happy happy. Today, I recovered an ottoman. A truly ugly one I bought for four dollars at Value Village. I bought it a nineteen dollar curtain and some swish new legs, tapped some finishing nails into ‘er, and whaddya know,  I have a fabulous new foot stool. I couldn’t be happier. It’s not like me to actually finish a project, but there’s one done. I also painted a wall in our kitchen with blackboard paint… that one’s finished too. And I moved around eight pieces of furniture in all… no, sorry, ten… and those projects are not quite finished. Too many ripples with each piece. Gotta take everything out of it. Decide whether it’s being kept, trashed or given away. Find a new place for it, make sure it gets to the garbage or into the charity bin, depending on what you’ve decided. Sweep behind each piece you move because holy god, what breeds under credenzas these days? Arrange the piece just so, and fill it up again.

And so I am almost done. I have all this orphan stuff lying around, and I am going to sort it out tonight if it kills me. Which it might if those dust bunnies mass together and rise up.

Why am I telling you this?

Because I think I’m nesting. The bun in my oven is Fallsy Downsies, and I think this frantic and furious nest-feathering is the novel’s way of telling me it’s ready to be written.

Which is great news because my vegetable crispers could really use a cleaning, and I find nothing can keep me from writing once it’s time to write…nothing can take me back to the procrastination stage…except a vegetable crisper in need. Lock up your crispers, people, I’m about to write.