I promise I’ll get back to
writing my novel in a minute, but first… AAAAAAAAA!
The world of NaNoWriMo
comes with all sorts of support.
There are forums, there are writing groups, there are inspirational pep
talks by famous authors, there are meetings, there are apps, and there are at
least a dozen tips and strategies for overcoming writer’s block and
procrastination.
What there is NOT is any
helpful advice about what to do when you sit down to write and see a GIANT
SPIDER just outside your office door.
See how it appears to be
getting larger in those photos?
Well that’s what it felt like in real life. (And no, I did not get that close to take its picture, I
just zoomed in on the first one I took.)
I know this is not the
biggest of all spiders—trust me, I have seen plenty of tarantulas. But this spider was different from the
tarantulas because A) It was in my house, and B) I didn’t know what it was.
I thought for a moment the
marking on its back kind of looked like a violin, so I thought it could be a
brown recluse. Then I thought it
looked more like a lava lamp, so I thought maybe it was some sort of hippie
type of brown recluse.
Most of you are thinking, Who cares? Squish it!
I can’t squish it. When
panic overtakes me, the idea of feeling that crunch under my foot or of
squishing it but not hard enough to kill it but just hard enough to make it mad
or the idea of it jumping at the last second onto my shoe and running up my leg
all keep me from being able to move.
Plus, I hate to kill things and then have someone tell me it was
harmless. And, I wasn’t wearing
shoes and didn’t think letting the thing out of my sight was a good idea.
When I see scorpions in
the house, I put a glass over them and let my husband deal with them when he
comes home. It works for us. So I decided to try that. But scorpions are slow and dumb and
spiders are fast and (I fear) smarter than I am. After standing, poised over the thing with a glass in my
hand, for several minutes hoping that a UPS guy or a solicitor would show up at
my door (I will buy whatever you are
selling if you get rid of this thing for me!) I finally trapped the little
sucker. And really made him mad.
However, that was not
enough because he has to stay trapped for nine hours. Sometimes, when I trap a scorpion, the cats play with the
glass and scoot it across the floor.
I cannot risk this big, angry, intelligent, possibly deadly, definitely scary
spider escaping. So I put a brick
on top of the glass. Then I put a
book on top of the brick. Then I
surrounded the glass with heavy books. Then I took away the front book because I need to be
able to see in to make sure he’s still there.
Well, the closest bookcase
to the spider is the one that holds all my horror books. So… what I made actually ended up
looking more like a shrine to the creepy guy than a cage.
Oh well, as long as it
works.
And now, I shall get back
to work DESPITE the fact that terror lurks right outside my doorway.
It may only be this:
But it feels like THIS:
[Note: No one show this blog post to my mom or
else she won’t come pet sit for me this weekend. Also, no one show it to my cousin or I’ll never convince her
to come visit me, ever.]
