Wips and time...

I still haven't learned to blog with pictures. Too far from home and with a strange computer, and my laptop browses at the speed of rocks, so despite this nifty, really cool, peachy fast computer I'm using...*sigh* broken promises.

Even though I'll be going to Salumi's later this week.

Oh, yeah.

The pig place. Home of the artisanal pork sandwich, where every bite is a tongue-tingling explosion of porky-fat goodness and chewy bread (although I'm not sure about the chewy bread. To me, chewy bread is stale bread, and I'm all about throwing that last end out with the trash)

Today I went to

this fabulous candy store

in Leavenworth, and yes--it was a hole in the wall, hidden behind a kitschy souvenir shop off a street that looked like small-town America hit with the weiner-stick. But the chocolate. Oh my God. This guy trained in Belgium. He made Belgian chocolates. It was like Fran's without the price. In fact, he had all the trendy sea salt caramels, and candied ginger truffles. And my absolute favorite of all time...gianduja. Dark, rich chocolate...a thick layer of hazelnut praline ganache and another, more intense layer of chocolate on the bottom, so you got the hazelnut praline first, then a beautifully mellow after-note of bittersweet. The caramelized hazelnut on the top was a gorgeously tasty touch, not too hard. Sort of like the delicate spun-sugar lace work on a palmier.

Beautiful. Like art for the mouth.

But anyway....chocolate and pork. Two of my favorite subjects, lol.

I've been beating on my latest wip for awhile, slowly working out the outline, and fleshing out the scenes--I mean, it's good. But so far nothing has struck me as inspired.

But while I was stuck at the Dallas Fort Worth airport, eight and a half HOURS, of sitting in the airport, then in the plane out on the tarmac while the a/c got progressively worse and my daughter (hell, everyone's daughter...) kept crying that her legs hurt. Stuff bubbled to the top.

Just dozing and thinking about my wip and the characters while everything that had been bothering me about my opening slipped into place. Because I had the time...

Seneca said, "Time is the only coin you have, do not let others spend it for you," and damned if I wasn't letting others mess with my cash. I need that down time. A little chunk of every day that's set aside, like Morpheus's Dreaming, where everything is possible.

Maybe we get so wound up in productivity and outlines, and having to do things a certain way that we forget what came first.

The dream.