Dry Run: Update 6

I don't often talk to my dad.  He and I do not see eye to eye, and he's the only person (other than myself) who doesn't mind reminding me what a cesspool my life has become.

But he's always been a huge fan of the Western genre, at least as far as movies go, which, let's face it, is all I really care about either.  He has seen hundreds of Westerns, and has either rewatched them all, or has an especial way of remembering them and their casts and details.  I spoke to him the other day, and since my last two stories were Westerns (well, Western-ish), I always try to ask him about some technical detail that he's familiar with.*

In "Into the Furnace," I'm still trying to figure out a way for the hero, Will, to succeed, to defeat evil, to save the day.  I asked Dad about explosives, about dynamite, about lighting a fuse with a gunshot, and what the highly-volatile goo that oozes out of the sticks in the movies is.

I told him my story was about a sheriff who comes to a little Western town only to find that something is taking the livestock and the occasional townsperson.  He said, "What?  Like a grizzly bear?  A mountain lion?"  I didn't want to bring up anything specific, for fear he would criticize me and my frivolous fixation on the fantastic, so I said, "Well, we don't know.  It's a monster, you know?"  I could have just told him it was a dinosaur, or a shark that operates on land, or a giant snake or something, but I didn't.

He chuckled and said, "You know, when I was in tenth grade, I wrote a story about a big monster that was up Praisden Canyon, coming down at night to steal people away."  This was the first time I'd ever heard that he did anything creative, much less wrote anything, and it's kind of shocking because I have written a couple stories about monsters up in the mountains.  In fact, "Unreleased" started out as a story about a bunch of high school kids who go up Praisden Canyon (even named so in the narrative) and stumble upon a secret, ancient evil up there.

So, there's that.

Here is my regular bar-graph update:

That's just over twenty-one percent, says my math.  And that ain't terrible.  This was due mostly to me not allowing myself to go to sleep the other night until I'd reached a round number (five thousand, in this case).  It feels nice to have positive progress every time I post one of these.  Guess that's because I only post when there's progress.  Tell no one.

Rish Outfield

*With the sequel to "Birth of a Sidekick," I asked him about rifles, specifically how accurate they were, how expensive, and how many shells a rifle of that era would hold.  He told me, even giving me a brand that everybody had in the American frontier (I wanna say it was Browning), but I neglected to write any of it down, and since forgot it all, so I guess I talked to him for naught, right?