Thursday, March 11, 2010

A Writer's Process

I don't usually have trouble keeping BIC (butt in chair) but some days ...

Perhaps a writer might decide that the house is becoming too much of a distraction, and some cleaning has to happen. This writer might, then, do the dishes, followed by a carpet steam-cleaning that gets about half the living room damp and the upstairs mostly uninhabitable due to carpet shampoo stench. The downstairs might be even worse, due to slowly decomposing rat nests. The solution? Paint that unattractive, scraped-up section of wall under the window seat RED.

The writer might have some RED paint from a previous paint job. Perhaps her daughter wanted her closet door trimmed in red, and the writer reflects, with a gentle smile on her face, on the fact that the RED paint job looks fabulous to this day. So she could therefore find a partial quart in the laundry room, and take it upstairs. Of course all writers have painter's tape just laying around, rolls and rolls of it from a sale at a hardware store.

(See, packrats aren't all bad.)

It might be, then, that after the writer tapes off the area and pats a little RED paint around on the wall, she will recall that this is a particularly translucent red (Velvet Cake, Miller Paint) and that she'll need some serious painting supplies. So she must merrily go, singing a song, to the hardware store where she will pick up some phosphate-free TSP (the rest can be used on something else, say a deck re-stain) and fancy primer on sale for half off! which she kindly asks to have some red put into it ...

... so that it's PINK.


Sadly, this does not change the fact that rather translucent reds remain translucent and any area she happens to accidentally double touch or add a little extra paint will be noticeably darker than the rest. The writer may contemplate this problem, and decide the only solution is to go to Home Depot where she has a gift card, and get a different RED.

Of course writers who are also watercolor artists can be wise in the ways of RED paint, and so the writer is somewhat likely to select the correct RED, a slightly warmer, opaque red called Red Delicious (Glidden Paint.) Being a writer has its disadvantages, though, because writers often forget to use the gift card and just swipe their debit card.

The result will have no choice but to turn out fabulous. The carpet stench must in time subside from extended drying, and therefore the writer may (the next day) at last breathe a happy sigh and write. Later, she will have the option to remove the painter's tape at her leisure, with the assistance of a very sharp knife.

Sharp knives do come in handy sometimes, as do the DHs who carry them.

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