Excuses, Excuses

One of the first thoughts I had this morning was I’d spent most of the previous day actually working on my opus.

And I didn’t actually write anything.

No, this isn’t one more excuse. I did work on my opus.

You see I’d been working on my opus the night before and in writing the scene I realized I couldn’t remember if a certain character had died in a battle or not. (They are at war.)

If he hadn’t died, I was fine, I could use him.

If he had died, I had a problem. Not because I couldn’t use him again, but because I hadn’t addressed his death.

So of course, I had to check.

Finding the correct scene wasn’t too difficult. However, it showed that the character in question had died. So I had to figure out how to address it.

But realizing this wasn’t the only time I’d forgotten a detail in my rather large opus, I thought it would be helpful if I had a complete list of all the characters which included any details about them, like being killed, so that I had an easy reference to refresh my memory when I needed it.

First I required a complete list.

So I started on page one and carefully combed through for all such details.

So far I have three and a half pages of names and I’m less than forty-five percent of the way through it. And I basically worked on it from the time I got up until I went to bed with few interruptions. (I told you it was an opus.)

I ate and even helped Bonnie and my daughter with their stories while still working on mine.

While I had been rather proud of myself for concentrating on my writing for so long, my next thought was that I hadn’t done a whole list of chores like balancing checkbooks, paying bills, dishes, laundry.

You get the idea.

The whole thing actually bummed me out. I had wanted to continue my search so I could address the issue of the characters death and finish the scene that had set the whole thing off. But, of course, I knew it would take a good part of the day to get my to-do list knocked down.

Then as I went over the things I was supposed to have done yesterday one particular item jumped out at me and I couldn’t help but laugh.

Usually I use my to-do list, and the many interruptions from my family, as an excuse for not writing. So I find it rather amusing that working on my opus was my excuse for not doing one very important thing on the top of my to-do list.

Write my blog post.

Smile. Make the day a brighter day.