Off to deal with further nonsense this morning. The trigger to this latest:  a hapless family of refugees we landed in the midst of a simmering brew of inter-generational chaos. I’ve decided no longer to ask myself how I find myself embroiled in these scenes. Someone put the rhetorical question last night: “How did I ever get mixed into this?” I answered: “Because there was a mess, therefore you stepped right into it.” My answer was also self-directed.

Fiction-wise, two characters dominate my morning thoughts. One is a human, the other, a spider. The spider appears in the draft’s first paragraphs in the first chapter. In the same manner as a spider once insisted on weaving a web across the frame of one kitchen door in my life, this spider doesn’t want to move from her selected web-weaving spot. The question for the writer being: how is the spider getting her daily nutrients between the bouts of web destruction by the human inhabitants? (I leave out the Why questions as in why is she there and why does she stick around. The spider might answer like the man who climbed the Everest: because the Everest was there. For the writer, the real question is the how of the spider’s survival.)

As for the human, she, like other characters in the draft, needs to give me more info about her life, loves, achievements, disappointments, and so on. Whether they will all appear in story form or not, I need them to better understand what she’s up to.

Voilà for now. Summer holidays ebbing toward The End. Some day, I may look back on these few months as a time of peace and quiet. Yes, minds are tricky places.