Bleeding Fiction

I had a good run writing today. I covered over a few of the problems I was having with few minor cultural snags that the real China's real history doesn't answer well enough for fiction but I still needed to answer. Overall, it went well.

Until the hammering started. It seemed that some new tenants were moving in downstairs and preperatory to that they were constructing an entirely new house within the bowels of the old. I ignored the noise as best I could. I can put up with a lot of distractions while I'm writing, but the hammering? Dear God the hammering! It cut under and above everything, jarring a word out of my head with every beat.

I weathered it for hours, sneaking in furtive sentances in the pauses when the carpenter's arm got tired, but finally, at half past two, with only 1,100 words added to the page, I had too much of a headache to continue. I ran away to the mall in search of refuge.

I left the mall at four o'clock a hundred dollars poorer then when I had entered and went home. Construction had not stopped, but fiction waits for no man. I was about to get to work again, ready with a glass of water and bottle of tylenol and prepared to slog through my fiction three words at a time in between the irregular beats of the hammer when the doorbell began to ring with such joyful insistance that I could only assume some errant three year old had found a new toy.

Erik answered the door and received a letter. The letter read, in part: "effective this date, [My Landlords] have conveyed the Premises to [My New Landlords]. [We] are hereby authorized and instructed to forward all future renatal payments, beginning with the January, 2004 rent directly to the new owner."

Oh, joy. My new landlords speak English well enough that... well, let's just say that were I interviewing them for the Camp USA program, I would turn them down on the basis of their English. They raised my rent, on top of it.

All in all, I can't complain. The increase in rent isn't even enough to sneeze at and we'll be able to muster through the language barrier the rare times we need to speak to our new landlord. We could have been kicked out and had to find a new place for likely more rent, so I consider myself lucky.

Now if only the damned hammering would stop...