ghostest with the mostest

I should be working, transcribing, paying the bills. But I'm too excited. I couldn't sleep last night, and I think I was visited by a ghost. That's not the reason for the excitement - just another of the "side effects" of it, I guess, so I'll write about it first.

Just as I was falling asleep, I was dreaming of two necklaces, beads - like prayer beads - hanging from under a staircase. I was reaching and at the same time a woman was coming up from the other side of the stairs reaching for the necklaces. Our hands reached them at the same time; they fell to the ground. I was awakened by the distinct sound of something falling in the far corner of my room, maybe my earbuds, I thought. I had been trying to go to sleep for awhile, but had lots of thoughts in my head, thoughts about my performance earlier that evening, thoughts about chapter 29, which I'm slowly but surely piecing together; I turned on the bedside lamp several times to write things down; I thought perhaps the earbuds plugged into my laptop might have been bumped.

I'm not often spooked (although that picture gave me a chill when I first found it!). I didn't turn on the light to check or anything. I just continued my journey toward sleep. It wasn't coming easy, but the time before when I had fallen asleep (before the falling beads woke me), I was going through the six sections of chapter 29 in my head:

1. The Black Man rises from the ashes.
2. August & Lorax on a plane to Houston.
3. Paul meets the Black Man.
4. August & Lorax decide to drive directly to his boyhood home.
5. Dar arrives home late from work; dinner is burned; Paul says the Black Man is upstairs with the children; she ignores him because he is drunk as always.
6. August & Lorax arrive at the smoldering remains of the house.

And then there was the tapping of the cat door in the window on the other side of my bed. I'm gonna fix that right now... (Done.) The cat door is unused now, since Timmy's passing. I have a curtain pulled in front of it, but it has a little tab to keep unwanted guests from entering. When the wind blows, it taps. I didn't think it was a ghost, actually, but it woke me up. But now it's fixed, I think - I stuck an eraser between the door and the tab - if it taps when I go to bed tonight, I will think it's a ghost!

I started working on going back to sleep again, then there was a distinct, single knock on my bedroom door. That's when I decided a ghost was in the house. I didn't feel afraid. I was just a tad annoyed that I was being kept awake, as much by the ghost as by the pot I'd smoked when I got home from the performance, and by chapter 29, which seemed to be unfolding because of the pot.

But anyway, I was excited and unable to sleep mostly because of the improv performance I did. C+T are out of town on tour, as are several of the students who were invited to perform, and it ended up being just me, L and K. It was at the Hideout, the scene of the crime, as it were, the place where I did my first, dismal improv show, that 2 a.m. embarrassment a month or so ago.

Well, I don't have words to describe the show without a boring play-by-play (as best as I can recall) description of it. But we were well connected. It was impressive. S and P1 were there, and they loved it. It was really great fun. And I keep thinking back on the few moments when P1, S and I were leaving, walking down the sidewalk toward her car behind a foursome, one of whom (a cute young man who was obviously in the audience) kept looking back at me and grinning real big. I guess that's what it's really all about!

The other bit of excitement is that, except for chapter 29 and a little bit of tidying up, I am done with august chagrin! I have begun posting the chapters on the august chagrin blog in order. I had previously been posting them in chronological order, but took everything off and put chapter one up. Chapter two will appear on Friday, and chapter three the following Monday. That's the plan. I've already got several of them scheduled to appear on the upcoming Mondays and Fridays. There's a link to the novel blog on the upper righthand corner of this blog.

Okay, I really should do some work now.