This appears to be the closest I've come to not writing since this thing began.
I took my laptop with me when I went out to buy groceries (my mom gave me a list, and my sister did too), and I wore a mask when I went to Walmart, feeling very self-conscious about it. I know, I know, one day, you'll look back on this and think, "You were embarrassed to be wearing a mask, when people were dying by the thousands?" And I guess I'll shrug sheepishly and said, "Yeah, at first, I was. I've never worn a mask before, and only about half the people walking around the store--including the employees--were wearing them. But as the days stretched into weeks and the weeks became months . . . the mask became commonplace. Seeing somebody without one on began to be like seeing a girl without a bra on, and by the fall, it became like seeing a dude with only a Speedo on . . . in church."
But I digress. Maybe I should've taken a picture of me with the mask on, but it didn't occur to me. The woman that rang me up at the register wore no mask or gloves, and I asked her why. She told me that the employees are given the option of wearing one or not wearing one, but that she didn't like them, so . . . well, no mask.
Again, in the coming weeks, that may sound absurd, but this cashier was young, and I remember thinking seat belts were unnecessary and irritating at that age. Live and learn, I guess.
Anyway, the point I was trying to make was that I took my laptop with me to get groceries, and then totally buried it with the stuff I bought at the store, and frankly, forgot that I had it. That's not an excuse or anything, but I didn't write anything when I had the time, and then, my nephew had to write a paper for school on whether Pluto should be classified as a planet or not (it totally should), and that ate up some time as well.
I had some recording to do, once it got quiet.
So, the main villain of "You're In Good Hands" shows up in the Prologue to that book, which I recorded around the end of February/beginning of March. Then, he's absent until the end (technically, that's not true, but he doesn't have any lines until nearly the end), which I recorded last week sometime. But brilliant me: I didn't listen to how I did his voice in the Prologue when I recorded Chapters 20 and 21 . . . so I did it totally differently.
I guess, like when I screwed up the stepdad's name, I could have chosen to go back and re-do the lines from the Prologue (since there are fewer), but I honestly liked that character more than the way I did it the first time. In a way, it's like the two Darrens on "Bewitched." Whether you prefer Sargent or York, you've got to pick a Dick.
So, last night, I sat down to re-voice all his lines, but I also took the opportunity to write a new exchange between the characters, and try to strengthen the point I was talking about in this post, that the witch has enough love for the girl that it outweighs her decades of self-serving evil. I'm glad I got to beef that up, at least a little.
It wasn't a lot of new content or information (I guess I'll have to tackle that, and the ramifications of what happens at the end of this one, in a third story, if I decide to do one*), but it ended up pushing the story from twenty-nine thousand words up to over thirty. And since I get paid by the wo-- oh, wait, I don't get paid by the word at all. Sigh.
I also started recording a Christmas story, but only made it about halfway through before my recorder was out of space. I stopped for the night and meant to get some editing done so I could free up space and finish it tonight.
At one point, I realized it was getting late and it's getting insanely cold outside, so I decided to take my run then. I started jogging in January, but I don't know that any night has been as cold as this one. But I remember my dad saying, when I was a little kid and it was too cold to shovel the walk, that hard work would keep me warm. So I ran, and I ended up surviving, which is nice.
Afterward, I finished up my "Many Faces of Christmas Eve" reading, and I'm really torn as to whether it's good or not. There are a couple strong moments, but it's awfully long, and though it's pretty absurd . . . I'm not sure it gets absurd enough, you know what I mean? Regardless, I recorded it, and adding a line or two here really only gained me a few words of writing for the day. I could have tried harder, I'm sure, to get my writing in today . . . but then, I could try harder in everything.
Once again, fiddle-dee-dee, tomorrow is another day.
Words Today: 416
Words In April: 13,939
I'm still on track, if my goal was a thousand words a day, but if I could do another two thousand word day, I'd be a little closer to where I was last month.
P.S. Every day I'm posting one of these:
*Right now, I have no plans to do a follow-up, but the interesting way a third tale could begin would be deciding how much Lara hates Old Widow Holcomb, and how the old woman deals with that. It's an interesting question: could you, if you were Lara Demming, EVER learn to trust the witch? And does the fact that Lara is only eleven make that trust easier or harder to come by?
The only other idea I have for a follow-up is that I keep thinking of that poor kid in Lara's sixth grade class that she cast a love spell on in the first story. I think it would be cool to have her talk to him years later, and discover he never quite got over that "first love" he had for the girl when he was eleven. That doesn't go anywhere, but is just a(nother) reason for Lara to feel guilty, really, but I think about it sometimes. We'll see.
NOTE: Rish from the future here. It's April 12th, 2021, and today, I'm finally writing that scene. I only came here because I hoped I had blogged about Lara's sister, and mentioned her name, because I've forgotten it, and in the manuscript in front of me, the sister's name is ____.
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