I'm So Dizzy, My Head Is Spinning...

I made it through my entire childhood without an ear infection, and now I have one.

Let there be no risk of ambiguity on the subject: I HATE EAR INFECTIONS.

First of all, they hurt the inside of your ear, but they also hurt the outside of your ear. The whole ear.

Second of all, you can't hear.

Third of all, it hurts to chew, so all I can eat is ice cream.

Fourth of all, I spent the whole day in bed yesterday, which means zero hours of work got done on TGLL. So now I'm camped out in front of ye olde iMac, hoping to slog through a couple gross (numerically speaking, two dozen dozen) pages and let some pure brillance pop into the narrative. This will take all day, though, especially considering all the breaks I have to take for antibiotic pills (every five hours), anitbiotic eardrops (every four hours), and ice cream (whenever the urge strikes). The beauty is that every twenty hours, the stars align and things come together like poetry. Ha.

And what is today's writing-related thought?

I think it's this: since I finally got over the massive storybump that was giving me metaophorical hives, I sped through the ending (not on purpose, it just worked out that way), and as of today I have started at the top to do a rundown. I would say a final rundown, but I think it puts a lot more pressure on you to think of anything as final. As long as the deadline does not loom with ferocity (and mine doesn't, but I do want to finish early for a number of reasons), there is no harm in leaving both the front and back door of the book open, so to speak. Run through the house, take a lap up through the side yard, and run through the house again.

If I'm talking nonsense, it's because I'm dizzy, hopped up on antibiotics (which I hate, by the way -- I'm part of the problem now, and don't think I don't know it), and can only barely hear out my left ear.

It gets much better if I hold my head sideways at a 90 degree angle. Bonus -- it doesn't even matter which side. But that makes it really hard to type.

Also, that thing where you try to clear your ears -- ? Don't do that. Trust me.

This makes me wonder about my poor characters. They really get the smackdown put on them (I don't write books about sex or drugs or drinking -- just violence). They really are much cooler than I am, because there's no way I could fight an angry spirit with an ear infection, much less, like, a bleeding spleen and a broken wrist.