C. L. Norman

Last night, I went to the Patricia Briggs signing at the local B&N. I went partly to say hi and mostly to wear my Rivers of Ink T-shirt for the fundraising book fair the store was hosting for the local writing conference I’m on the steering committee for.

As I was driving up the main street behind the mall, I saw a double flash of lightning over the city in front of me and thought “Cool.” I called home when I got to the store to ask my husband to tell my youngest about it. He loves lightning storms. The sky was black with rain clouds but I shrugged it off as a ‘normal’ storm and went inside. Twenty minutes later everyone was asking me if I had looked out the window, the apocalypse was here. (People in my neck of the woods. . .er . . desert can be so dramatic) So I looked out the window and sure enough the wind was blowing the rain sideways and the rain was coming down in buckets, and that isn’t an exaggeration. So I sat in the chair for the Q&A part of the signing and watched the weather.

About 10-15 minutes into the presentation, a niggling doubt started worming its way through my brain. Did I close my car window?

I knew I opened it after work at 1:15pm because the heat had built up and my AC doesn’t work and I needed to alleviate the stuffiness. But when I got home and I had to park in the driveway because my dear husband still hasn’t moved the camping gear he left in my spot in the garage, then did I close it? I wasn’t sure. I didn’t know.

After the event, at my car, I discovered the answer. My passenger side window was indeed open. Only an inch and a half but it was open. And that was enough. I had a puddle on my passenger seat, literally standing water on top of my copy of Realms of Fantasy which I had left lying there. My jacket, which was on the driver’s seat felt dry when I put it on but my seat was damp.

It might have been ok if I had been able to go straight home. I live less than 10 minutes from the mall. But it wasn’t ok. The cops had blockaded off a crucial part of the route home (not sure if it was an accident or flood or something else) and we were detoured. The detour took me down roads I was unfamiliar with and so I followed the car in front of me, hoping they knew which way to go. The road looped around and I arrived back at the cop car. Was this a trick? A detour that led nowhere? I tried again, taking the loop in the reverse direction and finally on the far side of the loop found a tiny street that led out of the area and to my home. Huzzah!

Meanwhile, my rear end was now cold and damp and the magazine a soggy mess. I pulled into the driveway and opened the garage and my husband still hasn’t put the camping gear away. Grrr.

        

At 4 am, a series of loud thumps and crashes woke me from my sound slumber. I stared at the ceiling for a moment, debating with myself if I really heard it, and if I did was it important enough to get out of bed to investigate. (Getting up that close to wake-up time pretty much guarantees that sleep time is over for me.) Deciding that indeed it was something I needed to investigate, I climbed out of bed and crept up the hall to the kitchen. Rounding the corner into the room, I saw the freezer door open. Suddenly, visions of kitty with ice cream on her chin danced in my head and I crept further into the room, dreading what I would find.

The black furry housecoat my husband wears is the exact shade of the kitty’s coat and I wasn’t reassured until I saw that it was man-shaped. I know, I know, I didn’t even think were-cat. What is wrong with me?

“Whatcha doin?”

“The icemaker is making a noise and it is driving me crazy. I am trying to get it to stop.” Did I mention my husband sleeps out in the living room on the recliner a lot? No, not because I kick him out of bed but because of his insane heartburn.

I reached into the freezer and fiddled with the thing and gave up after a mere 10 seconds. “I’ve got nuthin’.” And I turned around and went back to bed, hoping against hope that I could get another hour in before my alarm went off.

I did not get that hour and now I sit here in the living room (Hubby moved downstairs) listening to the icemaker make it’s noises (and they are normal noises, always were) and thinking about other sleepy-time adventures.

I have a history of sleepwalking. When my parents divorced when I was very young, I am told I spent the next year sleepwalking every night. I would toddle from room to room making sure everyone was where they were suppose to be. My mother told me this story and I have found that she exaggerated a lot of things but this one I believe because I still occasionally somnambulate. A few years ago, a friend was in our game room AKA back room playing some Magic: The Gathering with my husband after I had gone to bed.  His wife, who I had never met before, came to the front door with a crying two-year-old on her hip and knocked. Or so I am told. I got up from bed, let her in, and led her to the back room, and went back to bed with absolutely no memory of this. The next day at a birthday party, I met this lady for, what I thought, was the first time and was laughingly told differently.

That is just one very memorable instance of sleepwalking in recent years. Luckily, I don’t seem to leave the house while I am sleeping and I don’t do it very often anymore. A much milder form of it that I do much more often is talk in my sleep.

Talk in your sleep? you ask. No doubt thinking that that is normal. I do mumble and scream and yell in my dream state on occasion but I also hold entire conversations with folks in my sleep. I uphold my end of the conversation so well that folks have no clue that I am sleeping. Suddenly wishing I had cultivated this skill for use in the classroom. My children now have a firm rule that they can’t wake me up to ask permission to do something unless they are 100% sure that I am actually awake; longer conversations, getting me out of bed, the panicked breathless state that indicates I was awoken suddenly. My husband still insists on telling me the important things while I am asleep. “Work called and I have to go out of town.” My first clue that he is gone is when I can’t find his car in the garage the next morning.

Sigh.

And then there is the sleepy-time adventure my sisters still like to tease me about. I was 17 or 18, still living at home, when I heard my mother yelling in the middle of the night. I stumbled out of bed (weirdly enough, I wasn’t sleepwalking this time though I could have been for all the action I took) and found my mother and step-father in their robes yelling at a homeless (?) drunk (?) in our living room. It seems that this guy had gotten confused and wandered into our house—the front door was locked but the back was not—and liked the look of our couch.

So here I am with a stranger in our living room, in the middle of the night. Parents yelling. Stranger slurring his words loudly in response. And what do I do? I go back to bed.

Yep. No stranger danger for me in the middle of the night. I am too tired for concern and let my parents handle it. We could all have been murdered where we stood/lay but I wasn’t going to miss a minute of sleep. I am that dedicated to my rest. <nods sagely>

How ‘bout you? What sleepy-time hi-jinx do you get up to? And furthermore, can you remember them after you wake up?

        

School came easy for me. I skipped the 3rd grade after my mother found out my 1st and 2nd grade teachers had also recommended me skipping. After my 4th grade year, we changed school districts. The new district was harder academically than the one I came from and my mother offered me the choice of repeating the 4th grade or heading on to 5th. I, of course, said I want to be in the 5th grade. Duh.

She then told me that if I was going to maintain my “skipped-a-grade” status I couldn’t get any grades below a ‘C’. I had to stay above average or she would hold me back. Sounds like incentive to work hard on keeping my grades up. Right?

Wrong.

Getting B’s and A’s was easy. Oh so easy for me. I didn’t have to work at it. I could get by with minimal homework. Only two classes had me asking for help and actually *gasp* studying, chemistry and pre-calculus. Blech. I didn’t care about my grades as long as they weren’t C’s.

Even in college, these non-habits held me in good stead. As long as I attended classes, I could get good grades without cracking a book.

I am not telling you all this to brag but to bring up a point. I have awful, terrible, no-good work habits and now when I am trying to write stories and share them with others, I find I am trying to get by with the minimum needed for that pat on the back from my friends and family. People seem to enjoy my tales and it feels like they have given me a grade that is good enough to keep me going with little or no work from me.

Sigh.

These habits are hard to change twenty-five-ish years after I should have began forming them. I feel like those cartoons with the ginormous rock that they need to push up the mountain and they keep slipping back down. I want to push that rock up but it is so much easier to stay here at the bottom, back against the rock, butt on the ground.

So I say unto you: If you ever plan on working for yourself like writers do, do your homework now. Those habits will help you later. I promise.

Note: My mother told me about 12 years ago that my 5th grade teacher recommended I skip another grade and she declined. She thought it would put me too far behind socially. I sometimes wonder if I would have had to work harder in school if I had and so have those habits I so desperately wish I had now. Parallel universe time to find out.

        

Howdy friends. Just a quick drive-by post to keep you up to date.

Writing

Why is it a drive-by post you ask? Because I am a ditz apparently. About a week ago my husband came down with the announcement that we were going to go to MisCon after all. I pointed out that I didn’t have anything written for the workshop and the deadline is April 28th and he says “Write something.” Then last night I was looking at the guidelines for the workshop and saw that the submission must be received by the 28th. Arrrg! There goes my only other day off this week. So that means I have tonight and tomorrow morning to write and revise a couple thousand more words of a short story.

If you want to know why I don’t have a short story ready to send off it is because I have all my other completed ones in circulation and I feel it would be a cop out to use one of them for the workshop. My focus lately has been on attempting to finish a novel. Finish being the operative word as I have trouble with finishing anything. I wrote several short stories to prove to myself that I could finish things and now I need to move on to the long program.

Reading

Not a lot of reading this week that I wish to share. I did just finish a book that drove me crazy and so I won’t name names in it but I now have a good example of a protagonist who whines and does nothing to change her situation. I found this main character irritating at first and then annoying. Unfortunately for me that isn’t always enough to make me stop reading and so I finished the story but I sorta hate the MC and her twin sister too. Grrr.

I’ll leave you now. I hope you have a marvelous week ahead and I will talk with you again soon. Drop me a note and let me know how your week went.

        

Some days my brain takes longer to wake up. Add to that the cognitive processes I’ve devoted to a couple new writing projects and details slip through the cracks. This morning at 6:30am I slipped on some foot coverings, jumped in the car, and drove to work.

At the store I clocked in and went to my locker to store my coat and purse and a strange thought went through my head.

“My feet are comfy-cozy. And I’m at work.”

I looked down and realized that I was wearing my slippers. My cushy, brown leather moccassin type slippers. At work. Slippers aren’t usually part of the semi-pro look but for today, I made it work.

I think only one out of ten customers noticed.