Sleeping in Ditches at The Grand

I've been working on a family story called Sleeping In Ditches for nearly half a year. It's one of those situations in which the story imposes itself on you and then takes over your life with a never-ending flow of words that seem to be going nowhere but you can't give it up or switch to a new channel or unsubscribe or just delete the bloody thing because the words are just clever enough that you think they might be saying something or taking an idea somewhere and you're afraid that if you jump ship you'll miss the point so you keep writing not exactly day after day but on those days when you pick your daughter up at the Second Cup Coffee Shop and you get there an hour or so early to work on this damn story that's going nowhere and it's getting really frustrating but you know you're on to something so you can't stop until finally your boss sends you to Toronto and you're sitting in the patio at night with heat lamps burning your head where you used to have hair and the view is obscured by plastic wrap all around the patio to keep the cold out and you've forgotten how many bottles of beer and glasses of wine you've had and you're still suffering from jet lag though there's only an hour difference but you flew Air Canada and you're just about to take another sip of Shiraz and the top of your head explodes and your eyes bounce out of your head and your teeth start spinning in your mouth and it comes to you like a thunderous fart from the iodine sky ... the end of your story.

Or something like that. The damn thing's finished now. It's over. I can get on now.

Here's Karina's photo simulation of me writing on the patio of the Grand Hotel. Just imagine dozens of empty bottles and glasses and fire leaping out of my eyes ... and that would complete the simulation.