cat dreams

No cat business today, as it is a federal and banking holiday.
(I still have to work, mind. There are only six days a year that my company considers holidays. I'm probably going on foot and that means an early start, as it's extremely cold and no one will have shoveled the 14" or so of snow we got off their walks yet, ppl here are awful about sidewalks.)
However, I do have a cat affair to narrate.

Around 4:30am, I woke from a shallow sleep because of a mild disturbance. Chita was asleep in the crook of my elbow, where she'd nestled herself a while earlier as I'd come half-awake to accommodate her.
She was dreaming, her paws twitching semi-rhythmically, and letting out a series of little grunts, as if abbreviated meows. I woke slowly as I figured out what was going on, and turned my head to look at her, though it was dark so I couldn't really see much.
Eventually I shifted position a little to pet her, gently-- I've woken her from a dream too abruptly before, and gotten clawed for it.
She woke up and stuck her head straight up, looking around in apparent alarm, but I kept petting her and in a moment she sighed and flopped back over.

She's just settled back onto that elbow now, as I'm out of bed and on the couch after putting the coffeemaker to work. Makes it hard to type.

ohhh, my word, it is -1 out there. Brrrrr!

it's not a waste of time per se

so I have this novel I first started working on circa 2003, that's been through a number of iterations and every few years I go back and poke at it again.
one of the characters in it is sort of kind of a paladin type, i guess, except I never played D&D and never consumed much media that has paladins in it, so when I do, I sometimes think of him and sometimes well... don't. He doesn't quite fit the archetype but he does hit some of the notes.
Anyway, I was thinking of him again, so I went back and reread a bunch of that old novel today, and.
I mean.
Parts of it are quite good but at this point what I could probably do is split it off and make five or six different books out of it, because the problem is that I was Way Too Serious about Writing A Novel and so I delved way too much into every possible choice I could ever make for any of those characters. And I never fucking finished a draft.
No, well-- actually that's not true, there exists one complete draft. It's like 80,000 words long and I reread it today and it's. Well, it's not bad, writing-wise, but there's an awful lot of whiplash in it, like shit springs out of nowhere and wraps itself up neatly and I... don't like it that much.

Anyhow. I was complaining to Dude how I've wasted literally twenty years now writing and rewriting novels and never finishing one. He said, but is finishing them the point? He's spent that time making things he never quite finishes too, and enjoying the making of them. I explained that even if I understand I'll never make a living by writing, I want to share these things I make with people, and I can't if I don't finish them. So he agreed, finishing things is a good goal.
So I'll try to let go of feeling bad about never finishing something, and just go on and finish something.

(Ohh, in 2004 I was So Serious about finishing that novel. I worked literally 100 hours a week on it, tracked by how I had playlists I'd listen to only while working, and iTunes gave me my stats and I added it up and realized I had literally, actually averaged 100 hours of work over several weeks, when I'd been fired from my job and was stuck in that apartment with no prospects of any kind, and I just wrote and wrote and wrote.
I wound up with a completely unusable 300,000 word draft, and then I scrapped the whole thing, rewrote it in first person, and then scrapped it and rewrote it in third again. But my god, I definitely figured out how to do a close third person POV, which had been my goal.)

Someday though I'm going to finish a draft I actually like of that novel, and then it's over for you hoes.

(OK I just like that phrase, I don't know what I mean by that though.)

excerpt
( warnings for character death, childbirth, drunkenness, terrible weather )