#292 - Baldacci's Way

I thoroughly enjoyed working from home today. I got to sleep in and didn’t have to make a smoky commute into the city on a train that feels more like a cattle car.

The air outside still had a tinge of smoke scent to it, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as the last two days. I spent a minute touring the garden and seeing how the plants were handling the smoke. The tomato plants have gone bananas and are growing at a very fast rate. Our pepper plant has many good-sized fruits growing as well. All the other plants seem to be doing just fine.

I made a cortado and headed back up to my home studio desk. There wasn’t the usual gauntlet of messages waiting for me this morning and I was able to ease into the day in a very relaxed way.

My first meeting was at ten AM with the art director for our show. This is not a meeting I am usually invited to, but since I was filling in with my supervisor while she was away, I had to step in. It only lasted about a half hour, but we got to talk about the show, where we were at and how things were going.

I admitted that my week supervising had gone better than I’d anticipated and we had accomplished a great deal this week. I was expecting a lot more issues and problems to solve.

I did some organization and approvals until noon, when we decided it was time we got ourselves back to the park for a walk. With the smoke and in-studio days, we were overdue for some exercise in our favourite place.

The walk felt great and I came home feeling much better than I had in days. I’d got some walking in on the days I went into the studio, but it doesn’t have the same effect on the mind and body as the park walks do.

Back home, I grabbed a Dr. Pepper and did some more approvals. Later, the art director approved a large swath of paintings as well as making some revision requests. I put our revisionist onto the revisions, and I began the process of rendering the paintings and logging in the status changes from lead approved to art director approved.

Getting all the approvals put me into a good position for Monday when my supervisor returns. It looks much better to have a bunch of art director approved paintings completed.

I worked a little later than normal to make sure all the renders came out correctly and then called it a day.

We have visitors coming tomorrow, so I cut the lawn, got the leaf blower out and then watered the lawn while Robyn left to do her second job. I ate some leftover tandoori chicken with roasted vegetables for dinner while sitting on the porch.

Robyn grabbed some snacks for tomorrow before heading home and I helped her put things away when she returned.

I headed upstairs after. I was feeling exhausted from the long week and wanted to relax for a little while. Robyn joined me upstairs and we watched an episode of The Daily Show, followed by the newest episode of Silo.

We were interrupted halfway through when kiddo #2 called asking to be picked up from the GO bus station after returning from another date in Hamilton. I watched a little YouTube while she was gone and ended up viewing a Dean Martin and Bob Newheart sketch about a man that wants to return a toupee. Martin was having a hard time keeping it together and he only managed keep a straight face at the beginning.

It’s always great to see the older bits and see that they are still just as funny today as they were when the show first aired.

Robyn returned with the kiddo and we continued watching Silo.

It was another good episode.

I put on Seth Myers afterwards, mostly because I know that Robyn likes that show. They had Matt Damon on as a guest and I lost interest when most of the talk was about the World cup and then sports in general. And then to make matters worse, the second guest was a tv host who covered the World Cup games on Fox.

I was happy enough just to sit with my eyes closed and listen. I clearly needed to rest my eyes, and it felt good just to sit there and give them a break.

And before I knew it, it was after midnight.

I needed to get some writing done before bed, so I forced myself to stay up until about one AM.

It reminded me of a writing You Tube channel that interviewed David Baldacci. He was talking about how we wrote so many short stories for years and never really made any money. And that he wrote from 10 PM to 2 AM everyday for years.

The interview had a lot of interesting bits to it. The way Baldacci thinks about writing, readers and publishers was particularly interesting to me.

Another point I found surprising was how he tries to get you to think you know what’s going on at the beginning and then when the reader sees that they got it wrong, they want to stay and read more to see how things are going unfold. Subvert their expectations is another way of saying that.

The channel I was watching is one that I have mentioned before in these pages. The account is under David Perrell, and he seems to have access to all the big names in writing.

But he does get them talking about the craft in a way that a lot of other interviewers don’t do. And as a bonus the videos are usually an hour or more, which means they are packed with information.

Tomorrow is shaping up to be a busy day. We’ll likely have to today the house up a bit before company shows up around two. But before that I need to get some writing and research done for my mentor assignment which is due this weekend.

To do all that, I am going to need some good sleep.

So, I shall end this here.

Until tomorrow.