As I've said over and over (heck, maybe even on this blog, and recently), one of the best ways to motivate me to write is to put me someplace where I CAN'T write, like a meeting, a waiting room, a funeral, jury duty, a bar mitzvah, or a women's prison. Well, it was time to get the registration on my car done, and I noticed a little crack on my windshield that wasn't there last week (honestly, it wasn't, officer). I worried about it, but really started to worry when the crack began to expand, to lengthen, to move slowly across the glass, as inexorably as my very lonely death.
What the deuce was I going to do now? Aren't windshields, like, three hundred dollars to fix or replace? I'll take your silence for agreement here.
But then I realized that this particular area no longer requires the safety inspection of vehicles (for some presumably-deadly reason), so I was home free. I still had to take the car in to get the emissions test done, so I went on a Wednesday afternoon, and found, to my bewilderment, FIVE cars ahead of me in the line. The mechanic told me I could just come back another time, if I wanted to, otherwise it would be about an hour wait. But then I thought, "Hey, I could use that hour wait to write! I could be a real writer again! Oh, by my Auntie Gretchin would be so proud if she could see me!"*
So, I went in with my trusty notebook, and sat down in the little lobby, where fudgin' "Judge Judy" was on. I did what I could to ignore the television (but it was persistently shrill), and opened up my notebook. I was a little bummed out to see how little I've actually written in it. I started it in January 2018, and have only filled it about a third of the way through. But ah well.
So, I'm still between stories, so the first thing I wrote was a truly disturbing sketch for me and some poor female voice actress to do on the podcast. Truly disturbing in that my depraved mind would think anyone would find it funny (not unless somebody out there finds scrotums amusing). I finished that quite quickly, and then decided to go back to an abandoned project called "Balms & Sears," about a teenager named Alec and his grandfather moving to a new town in Colorado, but harboring a secret that Alec just can't keep secret no matter how hard he tries.
I started that one around 2016 or '17, and really tried my best to finish it last summer in between "A Sidekick To Miracles" and "Lara and the Witch 2." But I failed, having written The Big Reveal scene, and then just stopping.
So, I turned to a new page in the notebook and continued on from there, where Alec meets his uncle for the first time since he was a baby. And it wasn't too hard-going. In fact, it actually disappointed me when the mechanic came in to tell me that my car was done. He did mention the windshield, and pronounced it "unrepairable" (if that's an actual word), but also shrugged it off, since safety inspections are no longer required to keep cars on the road. Still, he told me to hound my generous fans for donations to fix it, and I told him I would do no such thing. I will play dead, but I will not beg.
So, not too shabby. Today, anyway.
Words Today: 979
Words Total: 9721
*She can't see me, however. Because she doesn't exist, no matter how often I refer to her.
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