Weekly Update 3/7

One of my goals for March was to either write or exercise every day this month.  As a sub-goal, I guess I'll keep track of my progress each day.

3/1
I went to the library and wrote fairly extensively (including that word I cannot spell, the B in FBI).  Also did a few sit-ups at my cousin's house.

3/2
I went to the library again and wrote nearly to the end of the story (it's now 4000 words long, dammit).  Toward the end, it occurred to me that I had an enormous plothole in front of me, and if I wanted to fix it, I'd have to rethink the whole darn thing.  It would mean changing an earlier scene, cutting a little bit from the middle, and eliminating the ending I came up with for it tonight.  
In other words, I think I'm just going to ignore the plothole and move on.  It's not like this is screenwriting, where you do draft after draft, flailing wildly in an attempt to please the producers, a potential buyer, or yourself.

3/3  

Unable (unwilling?) to go to the library again, I went for a run tonight.  It was the full run I used to do (1.6 miles), and I made it alright.  Guess I should start doing it regularly again.

3/4 
I sat down and (finally) recorded the Introduction and copyright bits for my next story collection, along with a flash fiction story to include in the next one, and recorded on Abigail Hilton's new book until I'd filled my memory card.  I then deleted a file and recorded again until I filled it once more (two paragraphs away from the end of the chapter), and then I said the f-word.

I hit the library again, knowing I'll be busy Batmanning tomorrow night.  I am close to finishing the first draft of my story for the writing contest (due in thirteen days).  It's gonna be five thousand words long, and that's way too long to cut it down for the thousand word contest limit.  But I'll deal with that when I get to "the end."

I was reminded today, looking over the document, that I had left a blank the other day when Olivia was trying to start her car, because I couldn't remember the word for the sound an engine makes trying to turn over.  So today, I looked it up, hoping there was a word for it I had simply forgotten.  It turns out that, no joke, the word for a car starting up is vroom.  That's not a word, boys and girls. 

There seems to be no word for what I was looking for, but if you DO consider vroom to be a word, then the word for an engine's attempt to start up is ruh ruh ruh.  And that's what I went with, Bossk help me.*

So, I don't believe I mentioned this the other day (it's still so weird not to be blogging daily), but I got discouraged when I discovered a massive plothole in the story and nearly stopped writing it, knowing I'd have to do a major rewrite.  But I didn't.

I did alright, got so close to finishing the story I actually typed "the end."  Oh, wait, I guess that is the definition of finishing it.

Final word count: 5761.  But I am feeling alright with it. 

3/5
Plans got canceled on me this afternoon, so I hit the library right before it closed.  It was raining on the way there, but when I went out to my car, there were two inches of snow on it.  I took my first attempt at writing a story for the contest, sitting at a reasonable 1303 words, and whittled it down to a thousand.  The library announced it was closing when I was at 1007 words, so I hastily rewrote two sentences, hoping they wouldn't log me out early (as they've done twice now), and saved the file and emailed it to myself when it reached exactly 1000.  

The story is frankly not very good, but hey, that can't be helped.

3/6
No writing again today.  As penance, I ran my 1.6 miles.  I had considered wearing a short-sleeved shirt on my run, but chickened out at the last minute (it was 30 degrees out today, surely colder at night).  I listened to a podcast while running, and it's the sort of thing that makes me want to podcast more, in case there's someone out there doing the same (running, not thinking about podcasting).

3/7
This was one of those days where I neither wanted to write nor exercise.  I went running last night (around 9:00 or 9:30), and it was cold, but survivable.  Tonight, it was midnight, and about ten degrees colder out, and I absolutely could not MAKE myself do it.  And there's a treadmill, right there, all I'd have to do is plug it in, turn it on, and go . . . and I wouldn't do it.

Instead, I decided to watch a show my niece told me she'd watched yesterday.  About a week ago, I saw a commercial for a horror/mystery series that struck me as "Lost" but with vampires.  It looked really good, but then the title came up, and it was, no joke, the Worst Title I Have Ever Seen In My Many Years Upon The Earth.**  I mean, it just floored me.  The TV series was called "From."

"From," boys and girls.  "From."

That should not be a thing, ladies and gentlemen.  People should've lost their jobs over that one, perhaps been put in jail for a year or so ("What are you in for?"  "Me, I punched a child in the face at San Diego Comic-Con.  You?"  "Oh, I executive produced a television series . . . we called it From."  "You sick son of a bitch!"), and I absolutely should NOT have watched the show, due to the title alone.

But I didn't want to exercise, so I watched "From" instead.

And it was the sort of garbage tailor made just for me.  There's a little town (presumably up in Canada, based on the Michael J. Fox way of saying "sorry") where the inhabitants can never leave, and once the sun goes down, they board themselves into their homes, because shape-shifting monsters lurk outside, and appear as loved ones to get folks to let them in the door or window.

I enjoyed it (though I was frustrated by the "Lost"-inspired everybody's-got-a-secret-that-will-be-parcelled-out-episode-by-episode aspect to the show), but I felt guilty throughout, knowing I wasn't exercising, and more importantly, being reminded of the snowstorm story I wanted to write almost twenty years ago (when there was this blizzard that struck when I was visiting Big Anklevich in his then-new house, and it looked like I'd be forced to spend the night), and never did.

I did a round of sit-ups, then bumped my head on the coffee table and used that as an excuse to stop and watched the show for another hour.  Then, I got down and did a few more sit-ups, but my heart just wasn't in it.

*Because I didn't want to waste another seven or eight minutes on it.

**And you gotta remember, I've lived through action movies called SOURCE CODE, PEPPERMINT, THE RHYTHM SECTION, THE 355, and BALLISTIC: ECKS VERSUS SEVER.  And let me throw in THE LAST MIMZY, HOW THE WEST WAS FUN, and MISTER MAGORIUM'S WONDER EMPORIUM for good measure.