The ones with two (or more) parts never quite work right. I've got to figure out a way to do them better.
Either that or make a friend.
Stats
Pre-Eighties Songs: 8
Eighties Songs: 10
Nineties Songs: 7
Aughts Songs: 1
Teens Songs: 6
Next up is my favorite one ever.
I talked to Big Anklevich today about his daily exercise and diet regimen . . . and he screwed up one day, forgetting to read from his non-fiction book (one of the prerequisites). And that was it, all she wrote, fat lady starts in on her song.
To my shock, he just quit the whole seventy-five day marathon, despite having kept it up for a month or so. I just plain didn't understand that, telling him that when I missed my push-ups on Friday or Saturday, I just did twice as many the next day, and I still consider myself on track. But Big doesn't work that way. He told me his wife said the same thing--"Just read two chapters in your To Serve Man book"--but he said he wouldn't do it, that you had to do all the things for seventy-five days straight or you couldn't consider yourself a success.
He had to start back at zero, and now he's discouraged enough to take a few days binge eating and soiling himself beside the swimming pool before he even considers starting it up again. That made me plenty sad.
But to each their own. We've all heard the inspirational tales of people with great integrity that find money in the street, or the answers to next week's quiz, or a parking meter with half an hour left on it, or a passed-out Jessica Simpson in the guest room at a party, and they have the strength to say, "Nope, I'm just going to leave it there, because even if nobody else in the world would ever know what I'd done . . . I'd know."
Those were almost exactly the words Big used on the phone with me (except it was Josh Gad from FROZEN passed out at the party), and that's pretty impressive. Because when I lived in L.A., I celebrated when I found a parking meter with time left on it.
But like Darkman said, "I'm learning to live with a lot of things."
The knowledge that my life is more than half over and I've accomplished practically nothing, that I'm going to die alone, and if I crashed my car I could never afford to replace it . . . well, those are daunting thoughts, middle of the night thoughts, depressing thoughts. Yet I have to continue. I have to keep writing and exercising, keep living my life with just a little hope, because otherwise, everything i2 Edvard Munch's The Scream again.*
Sit-ups Today: 111
Sit-ups In October: 3187
Push-ups Today: 72
Push-ups In October: 1210
Not much writing accomplished today, but every bit helps. Also, I sat down and re-recorded Chapter 5 of "My Friend of Misery," and re-recorded the "Delusions of Grandeur" podcast I accidentally deleted last week. It's not a tremendous amount, but it gives me stuff to edit on Wednesday. And isn't that what every growing boy needs?
Words Today: 749
Words In October: 15,826
*Little bit of trivia for you. Munch's "The Scream" is the most expensive painting ever to sell at Sotheby's auction. It went for $120 million in 2012. I dunno, seems pretty overpriced. I wouldn't pay over thirty-five million for it myself.
So guys, we're now five weeks behind with the Rish Outcast episodes, between the Patreon feed and this one. Blogging every day has taken its toll.
So, since I'm now dropping the Halloween episodes of my podcast, I'm going to have to either:
1) Post all my delayed Outcasts right now,
2) Skip to the Halloween shows and then post the summer ones afterward,
3) Just leave the missed/delayed episodes for only the Patreon supporters.
I'm not going to do the first one--even writing this post is taking up time I should be doing something else--and the third option might disappoint one or two of you.
So, I'm going to go with the second choice. I'll post the Halloween shows next, and then get the earlier ones posted in November. That way, the Christmas show(s?) will still drop in December.
Today, I'll have to leave the cabin--the one time I got to be here for three days instead of two. I woke up when the sun was still low in the sky, but laid there for a few minutes trying to go back to sleep. The fire had gone out (indeed, I never really got it burning last night--I kept having to re-light it and put more kindling on--perhaps these logs [the cursed ones] are just too fresh), but it wasn't at all cold in the cabin. In fact, after the fire from the night before went out yesterday, I kept waiting for the temperature to drop, and even brought in more wood, but it never did. Even at nine or ten o'clock at night, the temperature in here stayed the same, while it got colder and colder outside. I can't explain that, since the stove had gone cool again. Maybe it was a Chanukah miracle.
Now I sit here, typing, and the sun is just rising over the top of the mountain. All is quiet outside--with no construction equipment, big trucks roaring in the distance, or little four-wheelers making their wasp-like buzzing. Last night, I heard a car alarm go off (albeit briefly), and wondered just what use setting your alarm would be out here.*
Of course, I imagined Bigfoots or bears or monsters disturbing somebody's truck so the owners would come out and investigate. The delicious owners. And I thought about the monster in Shyamalan's THE VILLAGE. It wasn't a great film--the end of his streak of excellent films, I suppose--but the monster in that was truly terrifying, and an excellent design. As I sat on the back deck, reading my book, the family of deer that always congregate next door were sitting in the weeds, basking in the setting sun . . . and I imagined looking over at them, and finding a family of those VILLAGE monsters.
It wasn't a scary thought--after all, it was still daylight--but I thought that was a pretty great visual for a movie or a story. You know there are people or dogs or animals about, and when you look again, they have been replaced by something else.
I spoke too soon about the temperature in here. Somehow, it dropped eight degrees in here since the sun came up, which shouldn't really be possible. My hands were getting so cold I couldn't type properly. I went over to the stove and cleaned off all the ash from atop and around it, then burned all the paper towels, just sticking my hands over them until they were too hot to stand it. Now I can type again, but I'm sure the fire is going to go out again in a minute.
I ran out of stuff to edit, if you can believe it, so I grabbed my story for the Christmas podcast and wasted twenty minutes getting it down to the allotted ten minute runtime. Big Anklevich, who loves to criticize me when I do this, would have told me just to read the story over, much faster this time, and yes, that would have been a lot easier than taking out breaths and deciding which lines were expendable or not. Somehow, I got an eighteen minute story down to ten, and now that I saved it, I'll probably forget to submit it for the show. You know me.
I grabbed an episode I just recorded last week and edited it through to the end, so it looks like I've got three more episodes ready to go. That's nice. You know, I keep thinking about all my daily writing, and that when I finally miss a day, it'll be a relief because I'll focus on publishing, putting out "Dead & Breakfast" stories and publishing "My Friend of Misery" and "A Sidekick's Errand," and "Underdecorated" and "Podcatcher" and "Hatchling" and "That's the Spirit!"
But just now, I couldn't help but think of the next Will Choner story, and how I wanted to start it, with him getting a phone call while he's at his fat buddy's house, and she's only ever called him once before (and that was to find her cousin's engagement ring), but she's at a party and a guy started getting hot and heavy with her and she had a panic attack and went in the bathroom, and called Will to come and get her. This will reintroduce Beth Vance back into the story, and lead in to her convincing him to help her help people that need to find things they've lost--she does it as a form of therapy, and he does it because he'd do anything she says.
I am very tempted to just sit and start writing that right now, despite being super close to finishing the "Lara and the Witch" story, because the muse is kind of like the bowels: when you gotta go . . .
Sit-ups Today: 150
Sit-ups In October: 3076
I went out on the back deck and felt the sun on my face, and it was nice--even though it's cool outside and the wind can be positively chilling--and thought, "This might be it. The last time I get to do this this year."
I feel sorry for myself quite a bit, as you know. Or maybe you don't know. Maybe I don't mention it every single day because, hey, my family has a cabin that's only an hour away that I can use for free, and nobody ever uses it. I brought the giant Walmart t-Rex over here a month ago, thinking it would be fun to paint it green instead of orange, and I could've just set up all my paints on the table and left it as a work-in-progress, and nobody would've touched it, complained about it, or even seen it but me. Here's a photo of how it looks so far (I think one more trip down and it'll be done):
Push-ups Today: 71
Push-ups In October: 1138 (hey, the same as that awful George Lucas movie!)
I fell asleep for just a couple of minutes (might have been ten), and worried that I got a sunburn, and that too is kind of remarkable. It's nearly time to pack everything up and try to make sure this place is tidy for . . . well, the nobody who will come to visit it between now and the next time I'm here (I might even be back on Wednesday, if I can push myself to sit down and record a bunch of new chapters and give myself plenty to edit), and that always feels sad, like the last days of summer vacation as a boy.
I am lucky to have this place, and if I had friends, I'd be happy to bring them here or let them take it for a weekend or two (I always try to get my cousin to come out, even if it's just one night, where we could stay up watching "Seinfeld" DVDs or play boardgames or something, but he hates it literally as much as I love it up here, and neither of us have ever been able to convince the other he's right).
I watched the BBC remake of THE 39 STEPS as my movie last night, and it was pretty good. It's set right before World War I, set in the UK, and had a female spy set up for the British Secret Service, which seems wildly anachronistic considering they didn't even have the vote yet, but I know virtually nothing about WWI, so there may have been loads of them.**
I ended up writing the first few paragraphs of that Will Choner story (I'm tempted to call them "Lost & Found" stories, but Orson Scott Card's book ruined that for me, and I just now discovered that "The Case of the Missing Turtle" was actually titled "The Case of the Runaway Turtle." Whoops), and I could go on, just start writing it and seeing where it goes (I excel at writing boys-in-love-with-girls-out-of-their-league stories, for some mysterious reason), but I think I'll get everything cleaned up and go, before it gets too late in the day. I haven't stayed here three days in a row this year, and I don't know what to expect when I get home (if there's no work for me to do, that's a relief, but if there's no work, there's no money coming in either).
Words Today: 1130
Words In October: 15,077
*Of course they did it out of habit, just like I always lock my car out of habit, whether I'm in a city, at the post office, or out here in the middle of nowhere. My mom's car (she has a Toyota Camry) locks on its own, which has infuriated me before when I've gone out to help her unload groceries or retreive a book from the back seat. A car that locks all by itself--at the most inopportune moment--is great Horror movie fodder as well.
**At one point, the news arrives that Germany has invaded Belgium, and that England will declare war, and I wondered, Oh, is that how it happened?
So, besides all the dead flies, the other thing I discovered as soon as I came into the cabin yesterday, was mouse droppings back on the counter and stove. After my debacle with the mouse last week (which, gratefully, there's no sign of anymore), I thought I was free of rodents, but mice are, apparently, like white supremacists . . . mighty fine people. No, what I meant to say was, there are always more than one of them, always more than you think.
So, I laid out a trap as soon as I noticed the droppings, putting it on the floor this time (that horror that awaited me last Wednesday would've been better on the floor), and figuring, I could catch it during the night, and there'd be no time for putrification (the original title of the last Pierce Brosnan Bond movie, by the way).
So, I woke up this morning--not insanely early for a change, although I did wake up around five, just out of habit, checked that the fire was still going, and then went back to sleep--and noticed the mousetrap had not been sprung . . . but the peanut butter I'd put on it was all gone. Clever girl.
I laid down two just now, and we'll see if the mice dare come out during the day, or if they wait until tonight.*
So, the fall is rapidly giving way to something else, and when I came into the cabin this afternoon, I was greeted by dozens--if not hundreds--of dead flies at the bottom of every window. It's gotten too cold for them, I suppose. And to be honest, too cold for me.
I've put up with people bitching about the heat for, oh, five or six months, and now it's my turn. I do not welcome the return of winter--not today, not ever. Complain all you want, no matter how weak it sounds, that it's eighty-five at nine pm . . . nobody's fingers and toes ever dropped off because of the heat, you bastards.
Along those lines, I spent just a few minutes gathering wood for the fire--most of the wood I had stacked up against the house last week was still there, with nobody else coming to visit--and collected the logs from a tree my brother cut down in May or June. It had been a young tree, but last year's rainfall had eroded the ground around it and it was starting to tip . . . toward the cabin. Both he and I had noticed it and when the two of us were here together, he tied a rope to it, which I was in charge of pulling away from the cabin while he chainsawed it down. Since those logs were closest to the house, I decided to stack those this trip.
But as I carried them down to the deck, I discovered that people had carved their initials into them--my brother-in-law Dave, my Aunt Barbara (I assumed that's what BC'13 meant). And I wondered: is it wrong to burn logs that have people's carvings in them? Like, is it disrespectful . . . or bad luck?
Of course, I thought about writing a story about it--about the misfortune that befalls someone whose carvings go into the fire. And I left those two on the ground where I'd found them.*
I got to work editing our October episode of "Delusions of Grandeur" this afternoon, and it went swimmingly . . . except I seem to have deleted my half of the show. I even remember it happening last night, when I was (I thought) transferring the file to my Dropbox, and then deleting a file I had already edited. A moment later, I discovered that file I'd just deleted was still there, and I wondered what had happened. Well, now I know.
I do not look forward to wasting my time trying to recreate that recording. And I wish I could say this was the first or second time I've done this (I still have the audio of a That Gets My Goat that Big and Marshal sent me about the Avengers, that will never see the light of day), and even more so, that it'll be the last. But nope.
Sit-ups Today: 500
Sit-ups In October: 2626
Push-ups Today: 0
Darn, I blew it. I forgot the push-ups. I had such a fun time doing sit-ups during the movie I was watching (I just put the laptop beside me on the couch and did fifty at a time, over and over), that I forgot the push-ups. But hey, I'll do twice as many today.
Not as much writing either. I did some editing--next Outcast episode is ready to drop as soon as I go home--and I started on the next one, but was unable to do anything on the "DoG" episode other than stick on the intro and outro.
Words Today: 427
Words In October: 13,272
*Of course, it begs the question: wasn't the bad luck already incurred by having cut down a tree with initials on it? What's the difference between burning a log and leaving it to get covered in snow all winter?
I would normally be at the cabin today, and it threw off my whole week. It turned out that I didn't even have all that much work to do so I could afford to spend time on whatever I wanted, but the day flew by just the same.
I managed to go over to the library right before it closed. I got some more words done on the "Lara and the Witch" story, and that should have been finished by now, unless I need to have it be about something other than Lara falling in love and finding out if it's real or not. I had this idea of bringing in another villain, somebody from Holcomb's past that has been mentioned before, but I can't decide. Right now, I think I'll bring up the idea, and pay it off in a future story. But that would make this one a story roughly the length of the first tale, and I can't say whether that works or not.
Ah, eff it. I just want to get to "the end" on this one and go on to the next project. I have already started to feel my motivation wane, and my muse has grabbed her coat and gloves and will be heading out the door any time now. Then all this writing, all this exercise, all this truly pointless yearning and creativity will be in the rear-view mirror, and it will seem like a minor diversion I had one time, before going back to what I was before . . . what I always am.
But hey, it was a damned good run while it lasted.
Sit-ups Today: 150
Sit-ups In October: 2126
I guess I'm doing horror movies this month, because I watched another one. Oh, back in my day, there wasn't a week that went by without me watching a horror film . . . or two, or three. But now, I pretty much only watch them when Jeff comes to visit from Germany, or when Jordan Peele puts out a new one in theaters. This time, it was READY OR NOT, from 2019.
It was pretty good, really, and I enjoyed it quite a bit, with a moment or two absolutely delightful. But it wasn't perfect, and when I saw how high its Rotten Tomatoes score was (and read one reviewer that gave it a 10 out of 10), well, I have to say that I liked it a little bit less.
Push-ups Today: 68
Push-ups In October: 928
Boy, the push-ups sucked today. I only managed forty before I had to stop and rethink my life. I did manage to resume them a few seconds later, but the work was hard. What happens when I'm doing eighty, or a hundred of these a day? Crazy.
I enjoyed my run tonight, even though it was the coldest night since before summer. I was thinking about another writing project, and one of the things I dug in the past was attempting to re-imagine Western stories as Sci-Fi stories (much like you get OUTLAND which is HIGH NOON in space, or BATTLE BEYOND THE STARS which is THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN in space, or AVATAR which is DANCES WITH WOLVES/POCAHONTAS in space), and I got it into my head to try and transplant George Armstrong Custer to a space setting, and turn the Lakota-Cheyenne into aliens. I'm not sure if that's an exercise worth doing, since AVATAR really did the aliens-as-Native-Americans thing already, and one day there's supposed to be a ton of sequels coming out.
Words Today: 528
Words In October: 12,845
Okay, I keep breaking my own record. Record for push-ups or number of Taylor Swift songs I dare sing along to? Yes, both of those, but more applicably for today: breaking my own record for the latest in the day I still haven't written yet.
Today's was 2:05am.
There was a get-together at a friend's house tonight with a bunch of folks from high school (one of which I hadn't seen in nearly three decades), and as usual, I was inexplicably afraid to go to it. I mentioned it in a podcast once, and I think I said so just the other day, but I get this unreasonable dread whenever my old friends have a get-together, and always worry about how it will go, whether I will be accepted or not, whether I should even attend.
It was at the house of a guy I knew early on in high school, but then he moved away before we could become good friends. He'd stayed in touch with the other guys, though, and the one road trip my friends and I took together was to go to his high school graduation, a couple of days after mine. He and his wife now live in a huge, gorgeous home right next to the lake, but on the other side of it, so that, when I went out on their back deck, I could actually see the streets and businesses on my side I go to every week. It was a magnificent house that was so clean you'd think they moved in yesterday, and reminded me that I live in the kind of squalor they usually make reality shows about ("Oh my dear Lord, what are all these tampon boxes doing in here?!").*
 |
| (not my room, but it might as well be) |
I went, though, and even though there was a long stretch of discomfort when people started in on their religious beliefs (until, that is, it was revealed that one of the wives, from Bangladesh, was Muslim). That was an interesting conversation, in that everybody has their little thing, the thing that's most important to them, the thing they can't let go of and have to bring up at every opportunity. I guess it's sad that for me it's Star Wars, but hey, everybody has their thing.
I guess writing is a thing for me too, though I sure didn't get a lot of it done today (or this month).
So, it was a bunch of my high school friends and their wives, and I was the only solo party. I also seemed to be the only one who didn't want to talk about religious subjects--I just can't tolerate it, kids, any more than you would enjoy listening to my "Huzzah, abortions for everyone!" or "Women are inherently bi-sexual" diatribes. One of them, however, did lose most everybody else in the room when he started in about the entire nation of China doing Satan's work for him (poor guy must hate being put out of a job like that).
I am not a people person, as you know, Bob, but I do enjoy asking people questions about their jobs or their childhoods or their fears or being parents or their sexual disfunction or their brushes with nature--practically anything but their religious views. My old friend Dennis's new wife works at a ski resort and encounters celebrities and the ultra-rich, and she spoke--rather fascinatingly--about their exploits and entitlement, and I could've stood to listen to her stories for an hour or more.
Also, there was the girl from Bangladesh, who said almost nothing throughout the night, and for the first hour, I worried that she didn't speak English at all.
But I got to talk a lot myself, telling embarrassing stories and asking for details from everyone else (very few of the wives said anything throughout, and I wondered if they were just less comfortable with their husbands' friends, or if the role of a wife in a traditional conservative marriage is to sit there contentedly and say little).
Oh, and at one point, my buddy Dennis said the funniest thing of the evening, which really surprised me, because it was totally something I would've said. One of the guys, Kyle, was telling about the last time he'd wet the bed, and he said, "Oh, this was twenty or twenty-five . . ." "Days ago," Dennis filled in, before Kyle said, ". . . years back."
I got a huge laugh--bigger than I ever have before--from telling the story from two years ago about my brother and his encounter with a skunk at our house. I had meant to podcast about it, but got scared off by somebody who threatened to rage-quit the show over stuff like that, so I never mentioned it (though I do tell the story in "A Sidekick's Errand"), but dang, if it was that funny, I really should have told it.
My buddy Rhett's wife, who hates Disney with the burning passion I pretty much only hate The Orange One with, started bitching about UP, WALL-E, and TOY STORY 3 (all movies she hates), while extolling the virtues of, get this, TRANSFORMERS 2. That's right, REVENGE OF THE FALLEN. I did find out, from both of them, that their son thinks I am really cool, despite me snapping at him the last time he was around when I was trying to have a conversation with his dad.
Her antipathy toward Disney should be amusing, because she's so consistent about it, but since that company brings me more joy than any other (all they'd have to do is start manufacturing Pepsi and boobies, and they'd be the only organization I would need for happiness), it's pretty tiresome. I have talked about her before, though not in much detail, but she's staunchly anti-feminist, more so than anybody I know (even my uncle with his MAGA hat collection), and it's super hard for me to get my head around that. It was like that scene early on in "Downton Abbey" when you find out the Dowager Countess is vocally against women gaining the right to vote.
Anyway, because everybody in the room had to get up early or deal with complaining, needy children, we ended the night quite early (it was a weeknight, of course, and maybe that has something to do with it). Everyone had a long drive ahead of them. But it is a testament to how wrong I was to be hesitant to go that I would have enjoyed staying just a little while longer.
Sit-ups Today: 100
Sit-ups In October: 1976
Push-ups Today: 67
Push-ups In October: 860
Finally, at a bit past three, I quit for the day, having outlined the next scene and its aftermath, but only getting three hundred or so words total that qualify under my super-strict definition as writing. But I don't feel ashamed, not in the slightest. There are days when I'm going to be busier than others, and that I forced myself to write a couple of paragraphs before allowing myself to go to sleep is something I am more than willing to pat myself on the back over.
Words Today: 326
Words In October: 12,317
*Just the night before, my cousin had grimaced while looking into my car, which looks worse than the ones you see by freeway overpasses where homeless people live in them. Yes, it's quite horrific, as everything is in my life. And I was reminded of that line at the end of DARKMAN, where the bad guy says, "I know you too well! You could never live with yourself!" To which, Payton Westlake says, "I'm learning to live with a lot of things."
Rish and Cathexis take a look at Season One's "The Hitch-hiker," and talk about hitch-hiking in general. Going our way?
Download the show by Right-Clicking HERE.
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While it appeared that this was our last episode (I considered calling it our season finale for 2020), looks like the show WILL continue . . . if we find time enough at last.
I've got nothing to share with you today. Nothing of note happened, and I can't manage to even try to be entertaining today. Thing is, I stayed up awful late last night getting work done, even though I knew my alarm would be going off sooner than normal (Tuesdays I always get up early, because I am an idiot). But wouldn't you know it, sleepy or not, I woke up ten or fifteen minutes before my alarm went off.
Sit-ups Today: 150
Sit-ups In October: 1876
Push-ups Today: 66
Push-ups In October: 793
I did try to be ambitious, and went to the library in the afternoon. I managed to get a thousand words written--unfortunately, almost all of them supremely lame.*
Words Today: 1599 (what, I couldn't muster up one more word?)
Words In October: 11,991
Around nine pm, I went to my cousin's and we finished the season of "Star Trek: Lower Decks." The final episode was quite excellent, and featured two legacy characters as well as the deaths of everybody aboard a starship, both of which were nice surprises.
Afterward, we watched "Seinfeld"--we've been going through that series (which my cousin owns all of) from the first episode--I think we're on the fourth season now (around the time when it became a huge hit for NBC). I've only seen about half of the shows, so a lot of it is new to me, and it has been really enjoyable to see them all. I always felt that George was a kindred spirit--a character I really related to, despite the enormous amount of sex he somehow managed to have--and in revisiting it, I've appreciated more and more just what a tremendous talent Jason Alexander was.**
Anyway, because it's a Tuesday and I didn't get a nap in the afternoon (I usually don't, frankly), I fell asleep earlier than usual--during the second "Seinfeld" episode we watched. "Do you sleep, Chima?" he asked me, as he always does. I had to admit that I did, and he asked me how much of the episode I remembered, and I only recalled the first ten minutes or so.
As tribute to my cousin's coolness, he replayed the episode and watched it through a second time, just so I could see how everything worked out. I usually kick this guy under the bus, mostly because of his many, many attempts to murder me over the years, but that was pretty darn noble...especially when we went ahead and watched it a third time immediately after.
What can I say? I'm nothing if not a zzzzzzzzzz...
*I did double-check just now, and the few words that were not lame were "blonder," "alpacas," "practically," "bureau" (a word I couldn't spell correctly if your life depended on it), "pre-menopausal," "Chicken Broccoli Cheese," "barring," "zillion," "Barring" (the second time, but not the third time), "Gordian," "wheel well" (technically two words), and, oddly enough, "Montana."
**I used the past tense because, well, I haven't seen him do anything in years. He may just not have the starpower of Jerry Seinfeld or the appeal of Julia-Louis Dreyfuss.
Today was Columbus Day, which is problematic for a lot of people. But for me, it's a bank holiday, which meant I could stay in bed till eleven and blog for a couple hours in the afternoon. Jealous?
So, I did pathetically little when it came to writing last night. I thought I'd run over to the library and force a thousand words out of me, but hey, the library is closed too, so no chance for that.
One of Pacific Life's slogans is "The Power To Help You Succeed." I remember Nationwide's slogan as being "Nationwide Is On Your Side." I'm capitalizing them for a reason. Neither of those are perfect, but I'm really enjoying thinking about it (there's that writer Kim Harrison, that writes the "Hollows" series, where she takes Clint Eastwood movie titles and makes them about monsters--"For A Few Demons More," The Good, The Bad, and the Undead," "Every Which Way But Dead," "Two Ghosts For Sister Rachel," etc.--and half the fun of writing those has to be coming up with the titles).
Sit-ups Today: 100
Sit-ups In October: 1726
Last night, when I was recording Chapter 6 of "My Friend of Misery," I gave the end of Chapter 5 a listen, to keep the character of Mister Dark's voice consistent . . . and I discovered the sound quality to be really awful. It reminded me of the time last year I found out my microphone was on the stand backwards and was recording the opposite wall for a couple of days. But I checked, and the microphone was fine.
What had happened was that I inadvertently turned the Auto Level function while driving home in the dark last week, and it was cranking up the room noise before I said anything, then trying to compensate whenever I narrated. There was a lot of background hiss, then sharp inconsistency whenever I was talking (unusable, in other words). While I didn't just sit down and redo Chapter 5, I will have to do that sometime, and that's too bad.
Having said that, there is ZERO chance I won't find things to improve or clarify in my repeat performance of the chapter, and that means that Chapter 5, at least, will be better than it would have been without the screw up.
Push-ups Today: 65
Push-ups In October: 727
So, that horseshit about doing something every day so it becomes a habit turns out to be equestrian dookie, apparently. After writing 253 days in a row, I set my alarm tonight and nearly went to bed after having finished my push-ups . . . not realizing I hadn't done any writing yet. Ugh.
Words Today: 316
Words In October: 10,392
