Hot water makes everything better

We are both still damp and puckery from a relaxing trip to the local hot springs. We each swam a few laps and then soaked in varying degrees of heat, depending on whether we happen to be gestating babies or books, or both.

We are now in the front room of the main house, and Letterlady is preparing to kick Letterhubby's behind again in online Scrabble. We haven't had much luck with internet in our cottage, possibly because of the cloudy and rainy weather we've been having. According to my wee girl back home, the whole state is getting some showers, which is good, as I fear returning to dead flowers and grass despite the efforts of neighborhood children to keep everything green in my absence. I miss my girl and hope she's having fun at daycamp.

I read four more chapters of Letterlady's novel today. It's been frustrating her and I wish I could help her believe that it's fabulous, if not finished. The main character (I like to think of her as "our hero") is one of three in the book with the same name, and she's afraid she may have killed her boyfriend but she isn't sure. How's that for a premise, huh? Don't you wish you were here to read it? I thought so. In one of the chapters I read today, our hero's best friend goes missing, presumably subsumed into an underworld of eco-food terrorism determined to make eating safe for humanity again. Letterlady's descriptions of the organic supermarkets that rival one another and the people employed by said supermarkets is wickedly brilliant and hits a bit close to home in Boulder County (a favorite image being about the guy with the "white-boy dreadlocks" who's stacking leeks in the front of the store.)

Perhaps, Reader, if you were to leave an encouraging comment here for Letterlady, she would have more faith in herself and her book and would feel better about it all in the morning...

Demeter showed up in my novel today to try to bring Persephone home again, to no avail. Maybe that's why we've been having such gloomy weather around here... Hades continued his diabolical bad-boy behavior, and Letterlady put it best when she said that the hard part about moving forward is knowing that Persephone's life is going to get so much worse before it gets better. It's really true, I'm afraid. She doesn't even know that birth control pills are only available by prescription. Poor kid. She really tries.

Eurydice and Orpheus, however, are just getting started, and though their time together is necessarily shorter, at least it's appropriately consensual. I find them significantly harder to write, although a housemate for Eurydice showed up in the form of my darling friend Patrick, (from grad school) and he breathed new life into the chapter I was working on. Yay!

Okay. I think I have at least one more chapter in me tonight, and I'm happy to report that I wrote two poems this morning to make up for the one I didn't write yesterday. Does that mean I only get half credit?