Whenever I see 529 anything I see it as a boon, yes because of my birthday numbers or numeric shaping, whatever, but being up this early is a most conspicuous creative shove, certainly a prize for the writer. Downstairs with Emma after my wife telling me I’m up, it’s my turn and I’m more than happy to be up. Only taking me a couple minutes of rocking her in her room, in that chair and downstairs where her beat father makes some coffee and opens his laptop for a write. Thought about my first story in a string of 100 stories, 1 per day, 300-500 words, but I need freedom, true creative unhingedness for just a few moments; staring at my little girl while she sleeps, wrapped in her blanket, brought down here by her daddy who loves her like there’s not a thing else on this planet to love. Must say I’m proud of her father on a couple counts: 1, getting her to sleep and quelling that crying so quickly. 2, putting her down in the rocking bassinet down here in the living room without so much as one of those sleeping twitches from her. And finally, 3, that I’m FINALLY up early writing. And with coffee. AND….. Jackie not woken. If he does I’ll make it clear he has to be with Mommy as Sissy and Daddy are downstairs asleep. A perfectly appropriate white lie.
The coffee never tasted so animated and ravishing.
Day 4 in a row, pouring wine today. Not getting at all burned out, in fact my passion for wine has never been so fiery, so mused, since Emma’s birth. This little girl, and this morning being a beaming prime example, is just what my writing life and habits, project and varying pages, needed. She demands the end-game of a family winery, for all of us…..
Checked my account, still above water. Good.. evermore pushed to sell a piece or two after meeting those folks in the TR yesterday with that writer/blogger friend of theirs back home who “got picked up by the Washing Post and the New York Times”, as the lady in front of me with the yellow rain jacket put. And from writing about being a mother, and life as a wife, and just her real life. This group told me of her ‘100 story, 100 days’ effort, that’s where I pocketed such vision and so this morning is something alchemical in the regard that Mike Madigan’s a new writer— one more extreme and disciplined, precise, and quite frankly lethal. There is nothing that can halt my paginated assault, not with this little priestess at my 12, and Mr. Jack upstairs, dreaming and surely soon to wake up with that tired look to his cheeks and hair, and some adorable utterance to follow.
Emma makes a couple sounds, a cute groan that sounds like a stretch but she doesn’t move. Then back to sleep for the petit beat priestess. Quiet sip from my coffee.. and my sitting continues. Not in total dark as with past sessions when I have managed to wake early and hit the keyboard, but with blaring, atmospherically encouraging luminousness.. feel like I’m on stage. Or back stage. Or just back onstage, the audience, my little girl, today two weeks old, staring at me, wondering what the “star” of the feature’s to do.