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Left Jon tucked into bed. We made the mistake of turning off a DVD but not the television and got caught up in the movie, "Apooloosa" based on a Robert B. Parker book. Yes, the same Parker that does the Spenser and Jesse Stone series. I am a serious Spenser fan. Those early books are part of where I learned how to write good dialogue and to be in love with hard-case detectives. When people ask who Anita’s literary grandparents are, I could truthfully say Robert B. Parker’s Spenser books and the old Hammer Vampire films. (Does that count as literary?) I read "Interview with the Vampire" by Anne Rice and "Salem’s Lot" by Stephen King and they both made big impressions on me, but nothing resonated with me to the degree that Parker’s work did.

"Apooloosa" was amazing with Ed Harris and Viggo Mortensen as the main characters.  Harris also co-wrote screenplay and directed. It was Viggo’s bone structure that first made me go, "wait I know that face". He’s one of those actors that can vanish into a role like a good character actor but is still a leading man; gotta love it. Jon and I planned to watch just a little to see if we wanted to try and catch it later, then suddenly it was 1:00 AM and the show wasn’t over yet. This late I should be up for one of the following reasons: writing on a deadline or with the muse striking hard; up with friends having a great visit; up with family having a great visit; in an emergency, or having great sex. Television does not qualify as something worth setting my schedule off by this much, even good television doesn’t qualify, unless it is something watched with friends or family. We’ve stayed up and watched stuff with our daughter and counted it family time, and the same is occasionally true of friends, though usually if we’re up that late it’s conversation that’s kept us up not TV. But in a spirit of positive thinking I told Jon last night, "We can sleep in tomorrow and still get eight hours of sleep."

We did, we have, and I’m still not happy. Why? Because I haven’t eaten breakfast and it’s 10:37 here. I’ve munched on some fresh cherry tomatoes from our garden. I’m drinking tea, but when you’re on a nutrition plan that puts your calorie intact this low missing breakfast is bad. It makes you want to say, screw it and just eat what you want. Let’s face it most of us want sugary crap for breakfast, or at least I do. I checked on CalorieKing.com and found that what I want to go out and get for breakfast is almost half my calorie intake for the day. I don’t think so. Not having eaten in so long makes the discipline of it all that much harder.

The second reason I am not happy with the delayed start to my day is that I have writing to do. I will have writing to do most days until DIVINE MISDEMEANORS is turned into New York. There are a lot of reasons for that, but cutting the 50 pages earlier didn’t help. It’s a much better book for cutting all that and totally reworking that section of the book, but I didn’t get a stretch on my deadline because of it. I’m willing to work hard to make this Merry book the best it can be, but there comes a point when you look at your page count, your life, your deadlines and have to decide is this going to happen; can I deliver? We haven’t reached that dread moment yet, but if I keep sleeping in until almost lunch, then have to take care of the dogs, feed myself, and only then get going on the writing I’m just making it harder to keep the deadline. It’s a weekend without the kiddo and I’m trying to make as much hay as I can. I feel like I’ve misused my time.

Positive thoughts, positive thoughts: Jon finally got me to watch "The Frighteners" which is one of his favorite movies. I told him, "If it’s one of your favorites why haven’t we watched it in nine years?" He made noises at me, by end of film I understood. Some of the movie is too close to what I do for a living and it makes me pick at things. It makes me find the logic flaws, or anything that makes me cringe and go, "No way." I kept most of my thoughts to myself, and I enjoyed the movie, but I had a very hard time not picking at some of it. It had a really good twist end that I only saw a short time before it happened, that was cool. In fact, it’s a very fun film with good special effects even by today’s standards, but then it is a Peter Jackson film, co-written and directed by him, and it’s also produced by Robert Zemeckis with Michael J. Fox staring in it. It was a good film, but it was a little too close to a busman’s holiday for me. This is also why I watch almost no vampire TV shows or films, they drive me crazy, because it’s rare that their internal logic, or lack thereof, doesn’t bug me a lot. Think taking a police buddy to a cop film and listening to him tell you just how many times the police work on the screen is wrong. Lot’s. Jon knew that about me, and it is one of his favorites. He didn’t want me to not enjoy it, or to pick it apart. We compromised I tried to keep my mouth shut and only grumble in my head, and we enjoyed the movie together.

It was "The Frighteners" that we turned off and were suddenly on a TV channel and got us sucked into "Apooloosa". We’ll want to get the movie and watch it all at some point, and I even want to get the book which somehow I missed, but not today. Today it’s food and getting me to my desk. Unless my muse strikes hard the out-of-house-time Jon and I had planned on doing may have vanished under the getting-to-sleep-in-time.

A lot of you ask me what it takes to be a selling writer, well one of the biggest things it takes is displine. Short stories can be written when the muse strikes, if you only write a book when the muse strikes generally you never finish that book. Novels are about steady day-in-day-out work. They’re about sitting down on a beautiful summer’s day when you gaze out the window and want to run around the yard like a mad thing chasing your dogs, or just sitting in your garden, but instead you go to work. Does that take all the fun out of it for you? If so, be a plumber, or an accountant, or a thousand other jobs, because in the end writing novels is work. I love my work. I love creating characters and worlds and finding out what happens next, but it’s still work. Every job has it’s crap quotient, every job, the trick is is the job worth the crap to you? To me, it so is, because I’ve had other jobs, even in cooperate America. I never worked hours this long for a company, but for myself and my characters I’ll do the work.

I am really glad Jon and I didn’t make plans to go out with friends today, because I’d need to cancel and some of my friends I haven’t seen in weeks, some in months. When the schedule gets this tight I see friends that are more available for spur of the moment stuff, because I never know when I can break free and play. Here’s hoping the muse and I have a bumper day of quick, good pages so that there is some day left for Jon and I to find some playtime of our own.