4/23 Week In Review

 4/19

I've been sharing with you some of the spam messages I've been getting in my inbox.  The oddest one this week has the subject line "The brain inside your penis."  I've no effing idea what that means, so I went ahead and opened the email.

And it was blank.  Except for the line "To stop receiving messages, please visit here."  I copied and pasted that exactly as it was . . . with no link attached.  Weird stuff.

Over the last three days, I watched a movie I got from Netflix called THE VANISHING (2018).  It's a Psychological Thriller about three men maintaining a lighthouse, who discover a rowboat on the island, and eventually encounter murder and madness.  It's based on a true-life mystery from 1900 where three men simply disappeared from manning the Flanna Isles Lighthouse in Scotland.

It was an unpleasant movie, so I'm not recommending it to you and your fine family, but it was well made, and bummed me out, which I'm sure was the intention of the filmmakers.

4/20

It's four-twenty, so enjoy your doobie, pal.

I hurried over to the library before it closed, and now that I'm sitting here and logged onto the computer . . . my desire to write has completely fled from me.  That may be all the proof I need to know that the Devil is real.

4/21

Today is Earth Day.  I like the Earth.  I ought to do something nice to celebrate.  But I won't.

So, I've really let this blog thing go.  I got to the library, and I'm tempted to just sit down and go through each of my blog posts for the past week or so, check them for spelling, add some kind of stupid "Ah well" to each one of them, and publish them, instead of writing.

But I'm going to at least TRY to write a little on "Balms & Sears" today.  Wish me luck.

I have "Balms & Sears" in its own email, which I update every time I come here.  And it only has three words in the body of the email: "Keep it up!"  I like that, even if I don't always follow through.*  It sometimes makes me feel encouraged, and that's . . . well, something.

4/22

Last night, I remembered that I had an overdue Ray Bradbury short story collection (I remembered because I was sent an Overdue Notice email from the library), so I sat down to record an audio version of his most famous short story.**  I got about forty minutes into it before I looked down and realized that my memory had filled up and I was no longer recording.  So, I plugged in the device, looked for something to delete (there was nothing I hadn't already edited or released), and freed up just enough space to finish the story.

I got up to get a drink (butchering the Father of Modern Science Fiction is thirsty work), got distracted by various stuff, and came back to my room at about 1:25.  I didn't even consider finishing the recording, and the next day (today), I brought the book back and paid the late fees on it*** and it occurred to me that I have half a story recorded.  I'm not sure what I should do about that.

I have been complaining about my "Balms & Sears" book for weeks now, and today I decided that what I needed to do was create an outline for it, a point by point rundown of what happens in the book.  That way I could see which bits I have and which are lost or still need to be written.  I went all the way to the end, which I never had before, not in all the years I'd been writing it.  I'd been working up to a big emotional climax, and now, it would seem, there is a physical climax after that, at the end of the book.  Then it is over. 

I think it will really help me finish the story, now that I know where it's going (and going to end).  Stephen King would be disappointed in me, but deep down, he'd be more disappointed if I never finished the book at all.  Even though I got very little usable writing done today, I am happy with this progress, and will probably set another goal of getting it to 40K or 50 in May (my goal for April was 30K).  I don't know if the book is any good, but there are certainly some good parts in it, and that will have to be enough.

4/23

Over the last two days, I wrote a couple of blog posts on here (not yet publishing them), and then the darn computer wanted to restart.  I saved everything in my audio files, saved my text (just a story by another author I'll never get around to reading), and let the computer reboot.  When it came back up, I had no sound again, so I restarted three times, and then everything was fixed . . . except the blog posts were gone.

*For some reason, I was thinking of my outpost outbreak story, and how far along I got on it (tens of thousands of words, right?), and then just abandoned it.  And it made me pretty disappointed in myself.  Of course, I abandoned it in 2020, only to pick it up again ten or eleven months later, so that could happen again.  You never know.

**Or maybe second most famous.  Top three, for sure.

***You'll like this bit of trivia: young Ray Bradbury didn't own a typewriter, so he would go to the library where they had typewriters you could rent for ten cents every half hour.  It was there that he wrote the book that would become "Fahrenheit 451," and ended up paying the library nine dollars and eighty cents for the privilege.