What else I’m doing besides cooking

Cooking and reading about cooking and writing about cooking is not the sum total of my life these days.

It’s a gigantic part of it, of course (although after reading through my favorite food blogs I find my inner voice saying, Shut up about your excitement over learning to boil water already, would you?). But it’s not everything.

I have been writing. Not quite at the NaNo pace, but at the current moment that pace would be pretty hard to keep up. I was stuck for quite a long while on one particular plot point—no matter what I did or how I cajoled, my main character wouldn’t do what I told her to. I got nowhere with my rewrite for, dare I say it, weeks until last week I did an “interview” with my main character, me typing questions, “hearing” her responses. It was spectacular fun and reminded me of that strange way in which writing is an intersection of channeling and psychosis. Whatever. That interview (which lasted three hours) really sparked me to get going again.

Yesterday, in fact, during my Sunday morning writing session (during the weekends pretty much the only time I go and write is Sunday morning—Darin hangs with the kids, plays a little World of Warcraft, I go and caffeinate up and write) I had a spectacularly productive writing session, writing a scene that didn’t even occur during the first draft. I’m still hung up on the same plot point I was before, so I skipped ahead to write something else and found myself eleven pages into it. It felt really, really good to do that writing.

I don’t know why writing has that effect. I know that books and books have been written on the subject, but it’s still the closest thing I have to a mystical or spiritual experience. I see, hear, smell, feel something in my mind, and I write it down on paper to share the occasion with someone else.

§

I am also attempting to get back into the swing of things at the gym. I’ve made it at least three days a week since the beginning of the year. My attendance gets iffy when Simon gets a head cold (and boy, he seems to have one at least once a month), because I can’t bring him to the Kids Corner when he has a runny nose. (Hey, I wouldn’t want anyone else bringing their kid in if they had a runny nose; fair is fair.)