Lost in Constantinople

This and that:

Scram, our stray alley cat turned prince, is on the mend after emergency surgery on Monday. He was one sick kitty after some sort of puncture wound turned into a nasty infection. He's got a big scar and lots of stitches running down his shaved belly, but he's recovering nicely. I'm happy to report his personality is back, and he is as annoying as ever.

Scram is desperate to go outside to resume his patrols of the Bayberry Woods, and he has been howling at me all morning to let him out. I've tried to explain to him that he can't go out until he can jump into my lap, but he's insistent. I've mandated the jump test because I want him to be at least agile enough to escape the clutches of the dingo that lives next door before tasting freedom once again.

The brown rice and veggie "cleansing" diet is working its magic on both of us. Over the last few days Teri has dropped five pounds and I've lost four. I'm sure it's mostly water weight, but I'll take it.

I've been supplementing the diet with a couple of fish sticks each day, which violates both the letter and spirit of the diet. I can only handle so many celery sticks and apples before reaching for something less healthy. Teri, on the other hand, has been righteous from the start, but when she left this morning she asked me to pray that she can avoid the siren call of the Taco Bell drive through on the way home.

El Salvador joined the BYE League of Nations this week. How vergón is that? Hola to our new Wanaku friend.

I'm strangely fascinated by the figure skating at the Olympics. I still can't get over the corset costume Johnny Weir wore last week in the men's program. I've got a mental picture of my own plus-sized bubba body twirling around and busting the pink laces of that outfit, and it's not something anyone would ever want to see. Now you've got the same mental picture and it's going to be stuck in your head all day. Sorry.

Last night I watched the last bit of the women's figure skating short program. The combination of elegance and athleticism blows me away. The part that really mystifies me is all the spinning. How do they do that without getting dizzy and toppling over?

I missed most of the Olympics and Lost last night because I was off in a world of my own creation. I was writing away, and when I looked down at the lower right hand corner of my computer screen, it was 8:48 p.m.

This happens to me sometimes when I'm into my writing. I really do lose all track of time. When I go into my writing trance, the characters and the story become real. It's a strange thing. It doesn't happen every time I write, but it's cool when it does.

Last night my protagonist Eli, the embattled interim chief of a campus police department, surprised me by going to a graduate history course. It turns out he loves history and has been taking one class every semester for years and is close to earning his master's degree. Turns out that this soft-spoken southern boy is a brilliant student, and his professor spoke with him after class last night about the possibility of pursuing a PhD.

I had no idea about any of that until it happened. It wasn't in my outline or my notes.

It's more work for me when my characters do things without my prior knowledge or consent. Eli's intellectual pursuits meant that I had to research graduate history programs at several major state universities. Today I can tell you a lot about the requirements to earn advanced history degrees and the graduate course offerings at several schools--yesterday I couldn't.

Then there are the things I know about Eli that he doesn't. For instance, I know that he has marriage problems and some of the other residents of Constantinople also have an idea that there's trouble afoot on that front. But Eli won't find out until his wife gets back from her academic meeting in Vegas, and that's still several chapters away.

The feeling of reality is so strange.

Something I meant to be a minor sub-plot, the arrest of the star football player and subsequent fallout, has taken over the last few chapters. I didn't mean for that to happen, but the characters were dancing, so I let them. Lucky for me, the feds just showed up on campus demanding the hard drives for the dead professor's computers, so we're swerving back to the main story.

This morning as we were just waking up, Teri could tell that I was already somewhere else and lost in thought. When she asked me about it, I admitted she was right. She knew somehow that my body was in the bed with her, but my mind was off in Constantinople, Alabama, a city that never existed but is becoming more real to me by the day. I don't know how she knew tell that, but she did.