Staring Into Space

I had a lovely dinner last night that I had to leave early and appreciated everyone's graciousness around the table to let me go so soon, but I've been writing fiction and it seems to require a enormous amount of time of simply staring into space. Doing nothing. I thought I read somewhere that Thurber's wife used to say when he wandered around the house like a somnambulist in a daze, "Ut oh, he's writing again."

That's just about the way I get. Spend a lot of time on the floor looking up at the ceiling. I'm thinking about scenes, characters, stealing this limb or head or body from one real person, cutting and pasting it onto a fictional character. Noticing this meal or other, a real-live tuna noodle casserole, neatly inserted into a fictional suburban kitchen, the fictional wife ready to feed the fictional kids who will all bitch and moan about hating tuna.