The last day of the month. I haven't gotten any writing done today, nor any exercise, although I gathered some logs for the fire as the sun was going down and stacked them, and that should count (but it doesn't).
I got to the cabin and it was pleasant and warm. The leaves are a darker yellow than they were last week (some orange), and a lot more of them have fallen. When I came inside, the first thing I noticed was that there were flies inside the windows, lots and lots of flies. There's one side of the cabin that faced the sun at that time (it was late afternoon), and it was like that scene with the priest in THE AMITYVILLE HORROR on that window. It was against the door that I found the most of them, and I could easily have just opened the door and let them go outside, but I made it a point to grab the flyswatter and not rest until I had killed at least ten. I think I gave up at fifteen.
Even now, I can hear some buzzing around the windowpanes. They don't live very long, I've been told, and the shelf under each of the windows is littered with dead flies, or some that are in the process of dying on their own. I really ought to clean all that up for whoever will be coming up here next . . . oh yeah, that's only me.
Well, maybe I won't.
A couple odd things happened to me today. One was that I missed a sunset. I drove over to the lake to do a song, like I do every Wednesday, and when I got there, the sun had already set. Every other time I've done this (around nine o'clock in July, now around seven), the sun has just been sinking on the horizon, giving me a countdown to action. But tonight, I had missed it, and there was no beautiful orange and pink sky, like I've seen every visit to the lake that I can remember.
I started a take of the song, screwed it up, and quickly started again, worried the full-on dark would soon be on me. I sometimes hear an inner voice that asks me, "Rish, why do you insist on doing these damned songs every week? Have you learned nothing from sleeping alone these many years?" But I do what I do, and I'm not going to apologize for the things that give me pleasure. Nobody's forcing you to watch them.
The other weird thing of the day is, I was reading a Jason Sanford story just now while I was cooking some rice, and found myself nodding off. It's only eight pm, and I was falling asleep. That doesn't tend to happen to me. I suppose I should do some sit-ups, huh, get my blood pumping?
Sit-ups Today: 100
Sit-ups In September: 4433 (oh, why didn't I manage just eleven more?)
Push-ups Today: 52
Push-ups In September: 1202
Well, I did force myself to do my sit-ups and my push-ups (holy moley, will they always be this hard?), and that did wake me up a little. So I then sat down and started writing on my cryptid story again--the one with the deadline in two days. It flowed so easily, like I was that author my mom had shared the article about, the one who got accused of inappropriate hugging at a fan convention. Wouldn't that be nice?
This is a pretty dark story, I think, and if I wanted to, I could knuckle down and make myself finish it tonight, two days ahead of schedule. It would be easy. But instead (or maybe, in addition to, if I stay motivated), I started thinking about the third Lara and the Witch book, and just how dark I would dare let it go. The first one I defined as a YA story, even though it had some kind of sexual torture element to it (of course, all YA books do, don't they?). The second one went even darker, with the way it ends and everything.
But tonight, I thought I'd have the third book culminate in Lara, happier than you or I have ever been, running into the boy who took her virginity and broke her heart at the start of the book . . . and Holcomb has done something to him, something so horrible I've wasted ten minutes trying to think of what it could be. This boy cast Lara aside after he got what he wanted from her, but her "mother" decided that could not stand, and boy howdy, did she teach this guy a lesson. Lara sees the squalid misery this dumb, horny teenager now lives in, and she is reminded--for the first time in God knows how long--that Old Widow Holcomb is an evil person. And then she starts to question everything that's made her so happy in her life, leading to the big confrontation with the witch at the end of the book.
Gosh, if only I am talented enough to write it well, that would be a book worth reading.
Words Today: 1019
Words In September: 31,654 (which comes to more than a thousand words a day, and I'm absolutely fine with that)
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