Fabruary Sweeps - Day 18

Oh public library, thanks for being there.

I actually took this myself, with my shit camera.

I had two projects I worked on today, and wrote right up until the ten minute warning light began to flash.  You can bet your not-as-fat-as-you-think ass that I saved my work and emailed it to myself as soon as the warning came up.

So, I was working on "The Last Friday In December," and my new, untitled Horror piece today, and tried to split them both evenly.  The horror piece is interesting, in that the mayhem is far less interesting to me than the personal interaction between the characters.  The Dead & Breakfast story is interesting in that, for weeks now, I've been planning on introducing an important new character (I even went so far as to ask people on Facebook to name her for me--got a wide array of suggestions), and every time I write on it, I don't get to her.

Even today, I had her come into the lobby, and Natalie the Night Clerk thinks, "Oh, that's her, that's the one" the second she sees her (originally, I typed, Natalie the Night Clerk thinks, "That's it, the Rebels are there.  That is the system."  But I was afraid people would take that literally).

And then I stopped. I still haven't introduced this character, that should be so important for future stories (I say "should be" because the only story that takes place after this one was the first story in the series "True Ghost Encounter," and none of these characters are there for it. Dead? Possibly).  I think there's probably something unhealthy there.

Man, I need to just start putting these stories out there.  Even if only one person wanted to read them, that'd be better than none.  I went to two panels during my convention about cover art, and the amount of money the panelists were kicking around for cover art is more than all of my writing has ever made me, including contest winnings.  I understand that the cover is the most important aspect to get people to buy your stuff, but part of me just wants to put out a dozen stories (like one a week for the next three months) with just my name and the titles on them.

Like this:

And then, at some point in the vague future, I'd swap the covers out, one at a time, with better ones.  Heck, maybe some artist out there would say, "Oh, I'd handle _____ for you."  Seems like it could work alright, but I dunno.

Sometimes I feel like just doing this:

Anyway, on with the countdown.

Tuesdays tend to be the days I'm the freest, so I could have stayed at the library longer, but I decided to go jogging instead.  On Friday, I installed an app on my phone that keeps track of how far I run each day, and calls me anti-Semitic names if I don't reach a certain goal.*  Someday soon, I'll look back on me now and think, "Little did he know that one day he'd be dead."

View from my street

Anyway, as I started my run, the sun was just going down, and once again, we got a great sunset** and I was able to get a couple of cool pictures of it.  I don't know about you, but I quite like sunsets.

View from the hill two blocks down

I did record some video, but my gasping from my run (I fear I'll never enjoy it, kids) ruined the audio.  I hope, wherever you are, that the sun isn't quite gone yet.

Words Today: 2,303
Words Total: 25,805

*Last night, right before midnight, I was walking around Walmart with my cousin, when my phone made a little announcement.  Guess I had walked/ran the appropriate number of steps for the day.  "Did your phone just say, 'The Jews are the Chosen People?'" my cousin asked me.  I pretended I heard nothing.

**Oh, that reminds me, on Friday, there was another spectacular sunset as I left the writers conference, so I jumped in my car and tried to drive up the hill to where I could get a picture of it.  Unfortunately, it was Valentine's Day, and the traffic was terrible, and by the time I got up the hill, not only had the sun gone down, but my windshield was flecked with spittle . . . profanity spittle.