April Sweeps - Day 451

I had to drive forty-five minutes today to get a COVID test in order to qualify to work on a television show again (forty-five minutes from home, then longer coming back due to traffic).  It was the first gig I've gotten since January, when I had to bow out of another series because I had gotten sick less than ninety days from the shoot.  I get that they're trying to be hyper vigilant, but it put me on some kind of blacklist, and I got absolutely no work in the four months since then.  

Of course, I almost never did, so I chalk it up as dislike for me from the casting agent (he was pissy to me on the phone once when I worked on "Yellowstone," and I wonder if he didn't make some kind of black mark in my file even then).  Anyway, I got there, and they gave me a plastic container and told me to fill it to the line with spit, and then write my birthdate on it.

Then they handed me an empty Big Gulp container.

I found that to be strange (my previous test was to jab a swab up my nose), but apparently a lot of people are doing it.

Sit-ups Today: 100
Sit-ups In April: 2866

Last night, I decided the next story I would record for my podcast would be a dumb little tale I wrote last year called "Two Year Itch."  

But when I opened the file, it was another one of those stories that was cobbled together from daily writing, and was missing about a third in the middle.  So, I tried to track down those words and fill in the gap.  I only partially succeeded.

It would seem that, whatever I wrote on the 21st of September is gone, and that's the bit (or part of the bit) that I needed.  Very weirdly, though, there is a screen capture of that missing bit (well, some of it, anyway) in my blogpost from that day last year, where I mentioned that I tried to write a conversation about the devil in which neither character use that word, and when I tallied up the word count, it came to 666 words:

Well, it would seem that that image is all that remains of that day's writing.  Which is a bit creepy . . . but a lot more irritating than creepy.

What's frustrating (besides the fact that this kind of shite just keeps happening) is that I have to take time out of what should be my daily writing to try to copy down the above, and then fill in the rest of the gap, just so I have a completed story again (I found a copy from September in my desktop computer's 2020 folder, but it was even less complete than yesterday's version).

I did not get a lot of writing done (about 75-90% of it being rewrites), and I headed over to my cousin's house for the evening, having only managed some.  But some is better than none, and to my credit, when I got home, I wrote a tiny bit more on my twin story . . . but it doesn't matter now, because my computer shut off during the night, and when I restarted it (had to do it three times), there was nothing from yesterday in that file.

It's not a huge deal (except that I can't count the words, since I don't remember how much there was), since the rewrites on "Two Month Itch" were saved (apparently at 2:41am).  It might have been zero words anyway, right?

Push-ups Today: 100 
Push-ups In April: 2946

I was checking to see if I had a file of my D&B story "The Last Friday In December" today, to see if I could start recording it (in preparation for publishing it).  I didn't, but I found several stories in its place, alphabetically, at least.  There was "Last Call" and "Last Contact," which I wrote with Big.  There was "Last Minute Shopper," "Last Night of Freedom," and "Last Lunch At Charburger."  There was an old script called "The Last Resort" and an unfinished story called "The Last Boy On Earth."

Finally, I'm going to leave you with this:

When I first saw this picture of a Mickey Funko Pop Vinyl, my brain was convinced it was a three-eyed Mickey.  It still looks that way, if I squint.

Words Today: 438
Words In April: 18,725

*Although the file also has the title "Two Month Retreat" and "First Fight," both of which work better.