March Sweeps - Day 402

After yesterday's (admittedly) manic creative burst (a bit messy), I should just rest on my laurels, but I must confess to being curious where the story is going, and finding out what Old Widow Holcomb has to say about another witch at Lara's school.  I thought a bit about where it MIGHT go whilst running last night, but one thing about pantsing is that you can have the story surprise you.  And that can be good or bad.  Good if it ends up impressively better than you planned, but bad if it goes down a blind alley and you find yourself having to backtrack, or worse, stuck in a dead end with your leg in a beartrap.

Sit-ups Today: 66
Sit-ups In March: 918

I decided, at some point last year, that all the "Lara & the Witch" stories would have mushroom themes--although none of the stories at the first one have any mention of mushrooms--and I did a search for free images involving them.  I found a perfect one that I thought I'd ask Big to Photoshop into a Christmas scene for me, but he didn't answer his phone.  So I went ahead and used it to, I dunno, kill ten minutes of time I would've been using productively otherwise.

Push-ups Today: 66
Push-ups In March: 876

My cousin and I finished "WandaVision," only three or four days after everybody else did.  The internet did its darndest to spoil it for me (as they always do), but the Big Spoiler turned out to be a lie, so that was an interesting surprise.

I thought the series was really good and very cleverly done, and probably got more attention for its unusualness than a more typical Action series like "Falcon and the Winter Soldier" (which was originally scheduled to come first) would have done.  And they finally got her in the darn tiara.

There were a couple of aspects to the show that reminded me (rather embarrassingly) of the Old Widow Holcomb stories I've been writing, and it occurs to me now that maybe I've been so interested in new Lara Demming stories is because I've been watching a show about witches.  Something that I think the television series was missing was the sort of misandristic anti-male rhetoric shows about witches tend to revel in.  It's always men that are wanting to take away women's power and exterminate witches and that are frightened by groups of females practicing secret arts that only they understand.*  I think it's a natural bedrock beneath witch mythology (much less so than the devil-worship aspect that those from the pulpit will insist on), and it has been fun to toss little references to such things in Holcomb's dialogue, most of which fly over Lara's head (and to a certain extent, my own).

Of course, a certain friend of mine's wife would not appreciate me writing all these stories from a point of view I can never comprehend ("Oh, no.  Has Perpetua Trevorly been asking you for your menstrual blood again?"), and that I should stick to what I know, namely sports and chest hair and prostate exams and John Cougar Mellencamp.  But I never wrote this stuff for her anyway.

Even so, I did pretty well today too, nearly reaching a thousand words before that intercom clatters not unlike the gong that the natives use to summon Kong.

Words Today: 975
Words In March: 8535

*Oh god, I remember how terrified I was by the trailers for THE CRAFT back in 1996 or whenever it came out.  Every single micron of my patriarchal, midwestern, traditional religious upbringing was repulsed by it and its unsubtle Girls Over Boys themes.  To this day, the very thought of Fairuza Balk makes me strike at my genitals with a woodcarver's mallet.

Weird.  I thought that was everybody.