July 28th & 29th

July 28th.

This is strange.  I think I went to the library again on this day, but now I'm confused.  Did I really go two days in a row?  I--

Yeah, yeah, I did.  The day before, I'd gone right before closing, sitting on the first floor, and the second day, I went a couple hours before it closed, and went to the Quiet Floor, where the only interruptions would be in my pants.*

I didn't get a ton of new words written, but I did get very close to having all of "Mark on the Sky" typed up.  Only one more session ought to do it.

Words Today: 433
Total Words: 15,079

July 29th.

Saturday was going to be a difficult writing day, because I had to get up very early and drive down to the family cabin with my mom and brother, where we were going to stain/varnish/paint the outside walls/paneling.  I'm not sure what the word is where you put on a coat or two of brown glossy stuff, and then a layer of clear-coat over it.  But that's what we did, and with three of us working, we managed to get quite a bit of it done with zero casualties.

Although, technically, my writing might count as a casualty.  I did bring my notebook with me, and sat down at the table while my brother was mixing up the clear-coat, and tried to get some words in.  My mom kept coming over and talking to me, mostly about the flowers outside or the amount of cobwebs inside, or the amount of people that could stay at one time or where did all the paper towels go?  I think she may have just been talking to herself some of that time, but because I was there, trying hard to focus, I appreciated it less than I should have.

Not a lot of words.  On the drive back, she asked me to tell her about what I was writing.  I basically told her the entire story, at least all that I have, and she asked a couple of questions I don't know the answer to, and seemed to think this was a book series instead of a single YA novel.  She may be right, but if I was intimidated at the idea of writing a novel, how much worse would writing a series of novels be?

There was a get-together of old high school friends that evening, so I had enough time to get home, get showered (I was very dirty from all the painting, and I still see brown varnish on my elbow and fingernails), run over to Walmart to buy "a side" for people to eat (I got chips and salsa; I don't know what a side dish is, let alone a side), and get there only a half hour late.  I hobnobbed with some of the guys I knew in high school, but I was literally the only person there without kids, and that made me a bit of a third wheel (if not fifth or seventh).  It was kind of an eye-opening get-together, a reminder of just how old I'm getting, and also of how much less grown-up I am than the people I went to high school with.  It was still good to see them, but I have a lot less in common with those guys than I did decades ago.

I got home and felt like I should try to write just a little more, but I was too tired.  And in counting up the words in that terrible notebook, I suppose I did get a lot more writing done than I thought I did.  Maybe I wrote some of it in my sleep.

Words Today: 769
Total Words: 15,848

*Sorry, that's a bit of an overshare, yeah, but I sat down, got my notebook and my craptop set up, and then suddenly, had to run to the bathroom, if you know what I mean.  In the past, I've been savvy enough to take all my belongings with me to the restroom, because you never know, but this one was indeed an emergency, and I didn't really decide to leave my stuff on the desk, but was rather forced to.  I made my way, as fast as I could without drawing attention to myself, to the nearest toilet, and thank Bossk there was no one already in there . . . things would have ended badly.  Or worse, anyway.
When I came back to the cubicle, everything was as it had been, except for the note on a 3x5 card that said, "I kNOw wHaT yOU dID," that was put there by a librarian.  That was unsettling.