The McCartney Alarm

I love summertime. Mostly because there's lots of daylight, and I am definitely a lark (morning person, that is, as opposed to an owl, which is what the WGH is). The sun comes up at our house somewhere around five in the morning. The down side to that is that McCartney thinks that when the sun is up, everyone should be up.

He barks because he's thirsty. His sleeping place is one of those huge metal kennels that we keep in the basement (no, it's the downstairs living room - not the dank, moldy concrete bunker you just pictured). The kennel sits right inside the door that goes out into the back yard. When the sun comes up, it wakes him, of course (even with the blinds shut) and he says, "Hmmm, I need a drink." Unfortunately, we have yet to find the miracle of modern engineering that will allow us to keep a water supply inside the kennel without having this 70-pound puppy spill it all over the place, so this last statement is made in doggie language. BARK! BARK BARK BARK! BARK BARK! At 5:30 AM.

Most mornings I go down, take him out of the pen, let him get his drink, put him outside and then I go back to bed. One of these days I may do all of that and actually stay up, because I find I get a lot more done when I get up early. I used to do that every morning, when the kids were still in school. Summertime is lazy time. That's another reason I like it so much.

I've been working on the read-through of the WIP, and I was going great guns on it last night when somewhere around 10:00 PM and chapter fourteen I came across a note (from J.T., of course) that stopped me in my tracks. Something not jiving. Something that could be major but probably wasn't, but at that point I was out of brain power and decided to call it a night.

Now, I've said before that I suffer from occasional short-term memory issues. As I was drifting off to sleep last night, the epiphany struck. I know exactly how to fix that scene. Rather than doing the smart thing, which would have been to get up, trundle upstairs to the study and write down my idea, I resolved to remember this flash of brilliance in the morning. Please, Lord, I said, let me remember.

When the McCartney alarm went off this morning, I stumbled downstairs and did my thing with him, then went back to bed, not giving another thought to the book or my epiphany. At 7:45 I woke up, and praise the Lord, the epiphany was right there, as fresh in my mind as when it first hit me last night. I heard the angel choir. Really.

So, with all my busy-ness today (Sisters in Crime meets tonight) I will at some point get back into that scene and get it fixed. I did, in case you're wondering, finally write down a few notes so that if the short-term memory failure kicks in again, at least I have something to refer to. Let's just hope I can do the epiphany justice.

Read a book. It's good for you.

=) JB