January Sweeps - Day 355

Here we are again.  Every day, it starts over.

I've really been trying to get stories recorded for a) upcoming Outcast episodes* and b) inclusion in Audio Collection 4 and 5.  So I keep grabbing stories nobody's heard ("Roll With The Changes," "podcatcher," "Bad Trip," "Run Away," "White House Tour," "Secret 'Stache," and "Jogging To Stand Still") and trying to get one of them recorded before I allow myself to watch any TV.

At some point, I need to just stop with that and organize the two collections in a sort of order (picking which stories will be in each, and which will have to wait for Volume 6), then create a master text file to send to Amazon (and Big Anklevich), so I can claim it for audio.

That reminds me, I haven't got a lot of story story collections out there in text form.  If I put out ten stories in each, I could still have a dozen volumes published by the end of the year.**

Another thing I HAVE to get done as soon as I can is sending Audible my "My Friend of Misery" files.  I got back a list of plotholes from a beta reader, and so far, I haven't made any of the changes, which I'd have to do in the text file (then replace the old one with the new one), then record the new bits, then try to seamlessly insert them into the finished audio (this is difficult, but I find that, if I revert to the older audio on a line of dialogue, the edit is less noticeable.  

I've just about reached the end of my "Dead & Breakfast" novel.  I tied up two of the plot threads and I'm thinking about just leaving the third untied.  I'm going to write the last little bit now, and for a second there, I thought about killing Mason Bradley in it.  Just killing him in the last paragraph of the last page of the book.  I've been thinking of killing him anyway, since he's the surrogate for myself in these stories.

But I've already written a story that takes place after this one ("The New Model"), and Mason is alive in that one, so, I think I'll let him have a reprieve today.  He'll never know how close he came, though.

Sit-ups Today: 100
Sit-ups In January: 2439

Push-ups Today: 126
Push-ups In January: 1873

Well, I got to the end of the story, and it didn't even take a thousand words.  I mentioned the other day about somebody who wrote seven novels in 2020, and how small it made me feel, but it's a pretty good feeling to get to the end of another book.  Endorphins, right?  I wonder if they're the same ones that get released after I go on a run or see the TIE Fighter pilot go flying out of the ship that gets smashed by the asteroid in EMPIRE.

Words Today: 922
Words In January: 14,675

*Big still hasn't gotten back to me on the story he gets to be arbiter on.

**Not that I'm going to.  I had intended to put out a collection called "Darkness At The Edge Of Town," with small town horror stories in it (and I never did), the first collection of "Dead & Breakfast" stories called "The Niagara Falls of Haunted Houses," with six or seven of the stories in it, and one without a title that's stories with female protagonists (like "Like A Good Neighbor," "A Lovely Singing Voice," "Office Visit," and "Gunplay" (as well as "Run Away" and "Roll With The Changes").  Those three--along with the Christmas collection ("Naughty or Nice?") would be more than enough.