As I was writing the previous entry my daughter wandered into the room and I was telling her about some plans we might have to talk to her and her friends about the HP 6 midnight release party for the paper.

Then we got to talking about how much we enjoyed the last one. Here’s how we spent some great time together thanks to my hero, JK Rowling:

We showed up at Hastings somewhere between 11pm and 12am and ran into fellow diehard fans we knew from work. The grownups chatted while the kids ran amok in the store having fun and anxiously waiting for their books. There were games and prizes and it was generally a lot of fun.

We got our grubby mitts on 2 copies and raced home and began to read together in my room, me from my book, Shan from hers.

Unfortunately it was so late that we didn’t read for long before burning eyes and jaw-cracking yawns reminded us that we needed sleep. So we slept, but both of us were up early despite that so we could devour the book whole.

I sat in my chair and Shan lazed on the bed and we spent the entire day reading Order of the Phoenix. This is an 800-ish page book mind you. But I really cherish that day we spent reading. Into the wee hours of the next morning we carried on reading. But with only a few chapters to go, Shan could no longer prop up her eyelids and she reluctantly went to bed. However, I just couldn’t do it. I had to finish it and I didn’t have as much to go as she did so I ended up finishing the book about 17 hours after starting it.

To some it might seem quite sad to spend a whole day inside reading a book, but for Shan and me, it was heaven. And in about a month, we get to do it again. So thanks JK 🙂

Since I’m so intrigued with the Piano Man, and I’ve got such itchy fingers tonight I thought I’d get some stuff out of my head about the case. A sort of fan fiction experiment on this enigmatic, lost man.

I wrote the above paragraph about 10 minutes ago, and then I somehow got distracted by Trading Spouses. Why I don’t know, I meant to turn the TV off. I think the alt-tab world in which I live has weakened my attention span. When I finally came back to my screen here, I lost the mood to write something.

There. TV off. I always seem to have it on when I get home, but I never really watch it. I’ve talked about this before, but for some reason the quietness is louder than having the TV on. The throbbing hum of the AC in the hall outside my bedroom is a steady noise until it shuts off for a cycle. While it’s on it causes enough vibration to make the large picture I have hanging above my bed vibrate like a fingernail tapping on a desk. Occasionally I can hear the kid tapping on the computer in the living room. She’s in the middle of attepting to write a book and has excerpts and ideas throughout a myriad of old spiral notebooks and she’s trying to get them into a cohesive order in Word.

Either that or she’s on Neopets again. I hate it when she’s on that site because I agree with Wil Wheaton when he says the Internet(s) is full of freaks, present company excluded of course 🙂 But I have rather disturbing images of a 45 year old hairy man with glasses masturbating as he pretends to be a 13 year old girl on Neopets chatting to my daughter. I don’t know why the perv has glasses apart from most of the images of serial killers and pedophiles I’ve seen, they’re wearing unobtrusive but large glasses with wire frames.

But I know her passwords, usernames and all that and check her regularly (which she knows) and so far nothing quite that obscene.

Changing the subject… I used to have a blog where I kept most of my writing attempts, iedas, exrcises etc. Maybe I should dust it off and use it again. But I always start stuff like that with good intentions, and then gradually I end up distracted by other things until the dust begins to gather again and I put it away.

Anyone who might have read some of my old entries here might see a pattern in my enthusiasm for writing. The desire washes over me in great thundering waves and I become “serious” about writing and sometimes I do even make some progress. Or I get some grand idea like, “How about if I start a blog about my writing process, the ups, he downs, the in-betweens. It could be a repository for ideas, a virtual sounding board!”

Sounds good in theory, at least to me. So I start it, I write in it. I collect story ideas, I bitch about the lack of story ideas, or the lack of progression in a particular one. I force myself to freewrite for 10 minutes to let the ideas flow. Pretty soon the desire dries up, the waves recede and I retreat into my mundane life for a while, mindlessly getting up, going to work, coming home, watching a bit of TV, reading, then going to sleep.

Why does that happen? Is it because I maybe doubt myself too much. Even writing this silly blog I deleted some things I wrote because I know a few of the people who read this and I don’t want to ‘come off’ a certain way. How stupid is that? Pretty damn stupid quite frankly.

And how’s this for an abrupt ending? I want to blog about something else but in a different entry.