Ficcus Interruptus

My trusty magic notebook and I went back to Disney World at Christmas. And while I hammered out 7K of my work-in-progress, the magic bus-summoning ability of my notebook remained.

You see if you stay at a Disney resort, a bus comes and picks you up to take you to your choice of theme park. Christmas week is a peak time and it was as crowded as I’ve ever seen it, yet the magic notebook could not be stopped. Even if we’d just missed the last bus, after three sentences another bus to our resort would appear (despite the stated standard of twenty-minutes between buses.)

So picture if you will me—a woman in a princess tiara, T-shirt and shorts—scribbling in a 4 x 6 notebook while waiting for the bus to the Magic Kingdom at 7:00 in the morning, surrounded by hollowed-eyed parents drinking coffee and on-the-verge-of-tantrum hyped up children.

His fingers brushed the worn spot on Trey’s jeans where his holster rode, a broken fingernail catching on the frayed threads as Trey helped Daniel shove jeans and briefs out of the way. Trey rocked his hips forward as Daniel lifted the thickening length to his lips. A big heavy hand sifted through Daniel’s hair while he rubbed his face over the soft skin, stroking and kissing, fingers—

Nudge. “It’s our bus.” And alas, I get motion sickness—in cars and buses, not on rides—so I couldn’t finish that sentence on the bus. Poor Trey.

While in the parks, I did manage a few pages in lines, or waiting for food. My notebook knew no power over the lines for food. There is a delicious dissonance to writing the some of the words frequently used in my genre while the high-pitched giggles from a Mickey Mouse stage show drift across the artificial castle moats to where you are sitting at a table waiting for your vegetarian noodle bowl from the Tomorrowland Terrace.

But when it was time to return to the resort, I had no sooner stopped in the queue and put pen to paper… It was that coaxing whisper again, despite the whiskey-hoarse voice, but just as Daniel opened his mouth to protest, Trey whispered, “Nah, not trying to seduce you. Just want to know. I want to make you scream.”

Warmth exploded— A snort of laughter from my beloved spouse. “Bus is here.”

“But it’s not fair. Dialogue really shouldn’t count in the three sentence rule.”

“But the bus is still here.”

Honestly, whatever happened to those inconveniently long lines I remember from trips when I wasn’t writing to deadlines?

I hope you’re all enjoying your start to 2009. Happy New Year. Right now, I have some very frustrated characters to attend to.