I miss my sense of taste.
It's been almost a week since I last tasted anything, I mean really tasted. I can get little hints of things now and then. Chocolate comes through a little bit, as does salt. But the flavor is completely lost to me. And I can't tell you how depressing it is! It's hard to eat when you know what you're hungry for and even if you get it, you can't taste it. So, consequently, I've been sort of avoiding meals. Maybe that's the new diet plan. Get a permanent sinus infection and you'll never want to eat anything again.

I can't smell anything either, but I can find an up side to that a lot easier. No cigarette smoke, strong perfume, diesel exhaust, not to mention my two large dogs with slightly touchy gastrointestinal systems : )

But it's starting to make me a little panicky. Part of writing is creating a sensory experience for the reader, making them feel like they're there. Wherever there is. And for me, scent is a strong cue for writing. I mean, imagine a fair. You know the fair smell. Everyone does.

Asphalt, warmed and made kind of sticky by the August sun, the super sweet scent of cotton candy, elephant ears, and funnel cakes combined which is almost enough to make you feel a little sick, heated cooking grease, the warm homey smell of fresh french fries (I don't know why that is so comforting to me, but it is), bitter citrus from the lemon peels dropped to the ground and crushed beneath all the feet, sawdust and the faint but familiar smell of manure near the pony ride.

All of that is fair smell. And sometimes when I'm writing about something and it's not going well, I concentrate on the way it would be feel to be there. Heat beaming down on your bare arms, sweat dampening your shirt along the line of your spine, the overheated feeling of your toes after you've been walking around a bit, like they're little sausages about to split their skins.

And that helps put me in the moment. And more often than not, it ends up in whatever I'm writing, just because it anchors the scene. Makes it real. And sometimes in order to do that I have to revisit smells, sounds, tastes, etc. And I can't do that when I'm down two of the five senses!!! It's so frustrating!

And, of course, my overactive imagination doesn't help. It's telling me that perhaps I've contracted a rare sinus infection, one that leaves behind damaged senses of smell and taste. That I'll never taste or smell again...okay, probably a little melodramatic. But still something that keeps popping into my head. For those of you who have read Bitter Pill, my mystery, you can probably see where Rennie's mom gets her hypochondriac tendencies from : )

All right. That's it from the patient today (patient as in one who sick, not one who has patience. Because as my husband can testify, that definitely does not apply to me : ) )

Talk to you tomorrow. (Which I intend to do. Blogging daily has been difficult due to my inability type without shivering from fever or constantly blowing my nose. But things seem to be improving. Just not fast enough. See I'm an impatient patient, probably the worst kind!)