The ending hours of a day in the life of - well, this week, I'm not sure what of...
In part, I have a strong impression of what a single parent feels like. While Gwyn is away for a few days, it's just me - and our two "wild" shelti-poo puppies. And I once again realize that whoever told me about dogs being high maintenance was truly spot-on.
Originally I had the fantasy that, while Gwyn was away visiting her mother for a few days, I would be free to get a bunch of writing done. No television, none of the general domestic background activity that keeps one's attention occupied throughout the evening; I envisioned several days of uninterrupted concentration as I (hopefully) begin a new stretch of creativity. I have slowly and grudgingly gotten going on Children of the Stars, having plugged away at it for several months. At times I feel like great progress has been made. Other times, well, the feeling is different. So I the last two evenings, I greatly looked forward to a few days of uninterrupted writing. Time to get to work and make some great literary progress.
Wrong....
As I write this, I have to pause to pick up a dog toy and throw it down the front hall. Libby (our smaller sheltie-poo) has dropped the small rag bone at my feet. She has been yipping for the last minute, as I have been hashing through the previous paragraph. This is her less than subtle way of demanding that I do my duty as a human and throw the toy so she can fetch it. Such "help" has been plentiful all evening - and as a result, I have gotten next to nothing done on Children of the Stars.
Excuse me for a moment, while I toss the dog toy again...
As I was driving home from work this evening - in the midle of a light snowfall and a resulting traffic jam - a fragment of an idea came to me. Possibly as a result of several crises, disasters, etc., throughout the world, many people I have talked to describe a feeling of impending apocalypse. I hve to remind myself that this sense is nothign new. We've been getting prophecies of doom for tha last several thousand years, and l'm sure this trend will only accelerate, at least until some time after 12/22/2012. However, the sword-of-Damoclese feeling is palpable, and I have to admit, I often feel the same feeling - something is about to happen - somewhere out there.
When I got home, I started to concentrate on the thought. Whether true or not it does make a fantastic scenario in Children of the Stars. As I was sitting there munching on some supper and starting to put my thoughts into words (at that point only mentally), I suddenly got an e-mail from the person who is one of the models for one of the characters in my novel series - the psychic in my previous book named Andrea. The basic idea - without giving too much away - is that Andrea senses something catastrophic in the near future. And sure enough, only an hour or two after the thought popped into my mind, I received an e-mail from my friend. In it, she said that she senses something major about to happen. She indicated that she had heard this from several other psychics as well. They say there are no coincidences. Hmmm.
What this means, I certainly don't know. Recent history has been replete with predictions of events that never came to pass. Whether the predictions were wrong, or whether they were merely relating an increased probability of such an event is a topic of great debate among parapsychologists. But suffice it to say that we've heard such predictions many times before, seldom with enough detail to be useful. So for now, the best we can do is to keep our eyes and ears open for confirmation or refutation of - well, of whatever we're being warned about.
Meanwhile, Libby is yipping at me again. It's time to throw the dog toy once more.
As I sit down and plink away on this article, the contrast strikes me as both amazing and amusing. Synchronicity, apocalypse and dog toys; what a wide spectrum of experiences in the span of a few minutes. What a diverse and fascinating world we live in? And so far, thank God, of the three, only the synchronicities and the dog toys have turned out to be real. Let's hope it stays that way...
