April Sweeps - Day 62

I decided not to work this morning, and now I can't remember what I did do.  Early on-stage dementia seems to be a running theme on this blog.

Now it's afternoon, and I have to make up the work I didn't manage this morning.  Weird how selfishness is its own punishment.

Big Anklevich says he's going to finish his new story/novella today, and then the idea of what to do next is daunting to him.  For me, finishing a story is infinitely harder than starting one.  I started a new story on Tuesday, and came close to finishing a story yesterday.

I had to go to the storage unit again today (I sold two of the same figure, but only had one in the basement), but I couldn't find them there.  Furthermore, the wind was blowing hard enough that I didn't dare do the Meat Loaf song I had been rehearsing while during laundry today.  How sad would it be to drive over there JUST to sing a song?*

I feel like I'm close to finishing the Lara/Holcomb story, and I wonder what the reaction will be (besides a near-deafening silence).  In many ways, it's super derivative of all the YA bullshit that's out there, constantly breaking my heart worse than a live Adele song, but for me, it's very unlike what I'm used to writing.  Lara Demming is an average girl, not particularly smart, not particularly cute, not particularly special, and yet she makes this connection with an amoral, hundred year old (and quite possibly immortal) murderer and practitioner of dark magic . . . and somehow, the witch starts to care about the girl.  At the same time, Lara doesn't want to become evil herself, and I'm reminded of the advice, "Don't spend your time around toxic people."  And if I worried that I was one of said toxic people, surely Victoria Holcomb is top of the heap.

That dynamic, between naive, good-hearted girl and wicked old witch, seems like it would lend itself to multiple stories.  Guess we'll see.

I've already written five hundred something words today (went to the park again and sat in my car, editing and writing, and eventually doing the stairs, which wow, is never not a painful challenge, unlike the nightly runs), and I'm going to focus on my audiobook for the next little while.

I ended up sitting and going through the whole thing until it was done.  Oh, except for the closing credits, I always forget those.  It didn't quite expand the story to 30,000 words like I thought it would, but twenty-nine is respectable.  And that's one of my goals that is getting closer to achievement.

Revising stories doesn't add much to my word count, even though I spent fifty minutes or so on one of the chapters, substituting words here and there, trying to make the dialogue realistic (as I keep saying, Lara is not particularly smart, so words like "ingrate" and "simpleton" tend to confuse her), and pace things out to best effect.  I believe it only gained me, subtracting the second draft of those chapters from the final draft, about 129 words.  Ah well.

Technically, I could publish the ebook today, except, you guessed it, the cover art stops me.  I had this idea of redoing the first cover so that it was Lara standing facing the witch, holding her pendant (and there might be light or energy or blue wisps coming out of the pendant).  Then, for the sequel, it's the same image (or a mirror image), and this time, the witch has the pendant in her hand.  That was my first concept.

My second concept, if it had to be simpler, would be a girl's hand holding a pendant, complete with glow or wisps.  Except that works for "Like A Good Neighbor," not so much for the sequel.  Although, who cares, right?

If that's too complicated (and if I'm going to be drawing it myself, seems like it is), then how about just a pendant, maybe even a photo of a pendant, and I draw in the glow around it?

My fourth idea is just the mushroom thing again, finding a photo (or maybe turning a photo into a painting using one of those websites like I did with "Choice of a Sidekick") of two 'shrooms, and using that.

I'm going to call today good.  Well, good enough.

Words Today: 645
Words in April: 1849

P.S. Every day I'm posting one of these and picking a song.

Day 2. "Two Out of Three Ain't Bad" by Meat Loaf.  I didn't grow up with Meat Loaf.  I even missed his little resurgence in popularity in the early Nineties (though "I Would Do Anything For Love" is an excellent song, once I did hear it).  One night a decade or so back, we went out to do karaoke, and this fat, middle-aged guy got up and did a heart-rending version of "2 Out of 3" and I was just in awe.  I wasn't familiar with the song, but the guy just poured his soul into it, making it one of my new favorites.  I went out and tried to learn the song that very night, and it'll turn up in a Storage Unit Serenade before the end of the springtime.

*Don't answer that, because I've done it.