Well, I changed my mind. Not exactly at the last minute--I told my mom on Monday that there was probably a 20% chance I'd go to the cabin today--but pretty close to it. My nephews were up early today, being noisy, and despite my very late night last night, whenever I drink one of those energy drinks, I wake up extra early the next morning, and today was no exception.
So, I tried to get my work done, and . . . it was all finished by eleven or so. So, I decided to throw a couple of things in the car and drive to the cabin again. After all, I have to start on a new story today (or finish an old one), and it's good to have the time to focus.
The leaves are almost all yellow today, and several are falling as I watch (let me record a bit of video for you). Of course, the wind stopped the second I started my camera, but ah well.
Super quiet here, although I did see another person, and he arrived about five minutes after I did, when I had parked my car and walked down by the water to see if there were still fish in it (there were), and gone back to the car to drive through the gate. Well, you have to have a code or a passcard to get through the gate, and a big white truck pulled up to the gate literally four seconds before I did, so I just waited for the guy to drive through, and I would follow . . .
. . . but the gate opened, the truck pulled through, and then stopped. He stopped so I wouldn't be able to drive through as well. I honestly have never seen this before. It's like something out of a movie, like when Eddie Murphy would wait until the green light turned red again before going through the intersection so the trailing cops couldn't make it through behind him.
I rolled down my window, produced my passcard, and swiped it on the sensor, waving so the asshole could see it. It would have served the guy right if the gate had swung shut on him, scratching up his paintjob on both sides. But what's done is done, and I really ought to put it out of my mind. This is a place of relaxation and creativity, after all, so I should get to it.
After a nap, of course.
Sit-ups Today: 200
Sit-ups In September: 3473
Push-ups Today: 46
Push-ups In September: 853
I got a bit of editing done (on the last chapter of my audiobook--I'll have to ask somebody to listen to it, to catch all the errors), finished the Harlan Coben book (it was very enjoyable and I wish I'd read it in two weeks instead of a month, because the names would've been easier to keep straight and the emotional punch at the end would've been greater, had I kept it fresher in my mind), and around sixty-thirty I went out to the lake, as is my tradition to mangle a pop song.
I chose to tackle the Adele song I tried at the very start of this thing, having only taught myself the second verse and chorus. Last week--and I meant to talk about this, because it was amusing--I printed out the lyrics and brought them here so I could practice it.* Well, Adele's voice is at a much higher register than I am capable of, so to actually sing along with her, I have to work as hard as the darn daily push-ups (or harder). And I can only keep that up for two songs, maybe only one, because I start to cough, before my voice gives out (again, like the push-ups).
So I turned off the song and decided to try it by myself, just a little lower. And it was working fine, until the second chorus, where I really have to belt it out. The windows were all closed (still are--I don't suppose they'll open again this year), but my voice apparently carried, because at the cabin next door, the family of deer that sleep in the shade under their deck suddenly went running out and down the hill, doing that graceful-yet-comical bouncing thing that mule deer do. They headed for the hills just as they would have if I'd taken a shot at them with my brother's rifle.
"Everybody's a critic," I was clever enough to remark to no one at all.
So, today, I strived to get the lyrics for the bridge and first verse down, and then drove out to the lake and marched all the way around it, where there were some trees with entirely yellow leaves I thought would be a nice backdrop** and that's where I did my song. I screwed it up once--just in the second line, thank Bossk--and had to start over, but made it through all the way, and didn't think it sounded too terrible (except for that one high bit on the bridge, and by that point, I just laughed and kept on going, because I do these for me, not for some kind of perfect public performance). Truth be told, when I edit these suckers, I'm consistently shocked by how I always get at least one lyric wrong. I could go up and do an entirely lyric-less song, and still screw it up somehow.
There were two fishermen in a boat out on the lake, which I assume is the same boat I see out there every Wednesday, but I think I had gone far enough away so as not to bother them. Okay, that's blinkardly naïve--the way sound carries here, they heard me for sure. Probably scared off all the fish too.
Words Today: 2 (not sure how that's possible, but there's only two written here)
Six months ago, when Big was still struggling with the daily writing (he's done now, have I mentioned that? He got to 300,000 words, and now he's reading and exercising instead of writing every day, and that takes up the same amount of time or more), he'd occasionally lament the days when he didn't write until right before bed, and then it was like getting blood out of a turnip for him to reach his word goal.
That was today for me. I recognized that I hadn't written, and chalked it up to having to start a new project (with none in mind), but once my body was tired and I couldn't concentrate on the movie I'd been watching (THE MAN FROM LA MANCHA), I worried that this was it, that even if I'd written two words today (technically just changing a sentence on the story I just finished), it was possible my daily writing marathon had come to a close.
But I'm better than that, dammit. I have dragged my flabby, grotesque body out of bed at night to go in the living room and do sit-ups or push-ups before, and I could do that again with writing.
I grabbed the file from August where I'd been writing the Lara Demming In Love story, and continued it from where I'd left off. It has only been three weeks, and I couldn't remember where it was supposed to go (she casts a spell of happiness, hoping to make everyone feel what she feels . . . and how could that possibly go wrong?). In the absolute nadir of my writing career, I had half of her bus to school sing "Happy" by Pharrell, because I couldn't think of a newer (or better) song that a bunch of Gen Zs would all know (originally, I had wanted to to be something from the Eighties, or Sixties Motown . . . because those are better songs, and it is magic, after all).
I'm sure I was inspired/ripping off that great scene in ALMOST FAMOUS, where everybody on the bus knows "Tiny Dancer," and was my own introduction to that song, and I wanted it to be a song from my youth (when I was in high school, we went on a bus trip north, and a bunch of the girls in my class were singing . . . shoot, I forget now. It was a Wilson Phillips song, but not one of the ones I knew from the radio, and I thought it was remarkable, and literally think about those girls on the bus every time I hear the song (was it "You're In Love?"--"You're in love, that's the way, it should be, because I want you to be happy; you're in love, and I know, that you're not in love with me. But it's enough for me to know that you're in love, now I'll let you go...")
It might have been five years ago that this happened. Or thirty, going by the calendar.
I wanted them to sing a more classic song, but a teen wouldn't know a song from my youth. Invented studies show that only one out of twelve Gen Zers know "Hey Jude," but fourteen out of twelve know that execrable Doja Cat song made famous on Tik Tok.***
I wrote a little bit after that, but I was not inspired, and I kept closing my eyes, just to rest them (I'd been doing intricate work involving cellular anti-mitosis under a microscope all day, after all), and finally quit once I'd reached four hundred or so words. Not good, I know, but tomorrow I will think more of a new project, or buckle down and finish one of my old ones.
Words Today: 567
Words In September: 24,171
*Indeed, despite evidence to the contrary, I do practice my Storage Unit Serenades before I record them. Sigh.
**Yeah, I recognize the folly of going to a lake around sunset, where the pretty light is reflected by the pretty water . . . and then pointing my camera AWAY from it, but I've done this a dozen times, and I like to switch it up.
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