The sun is going down, and it looks like a nice sunset is happening in the distance. I am tempted to do my run now, and again, it blows my mind that I look more forward to running 1.6 miles than I do to writing a thousand words.* So far, I'm at 145.
This last five months (I'm going from December to now) has been the most interesting ones in a long, long time. My levels of motivation have been sky-high (though I feel like they may have abated some since January and February), my productivity has been . . . well, pretty good, but I've shared almost none of it (and that was always a bigger problem than the actual writing). The snafu with eBay yesterday notwithstanding, I'm selling tons of figures, at a level with the annual highpoints of November and December, and I'm slowly whittling away at my debt (part of it is that I'm not buying anything new).
Let me frankly ask the question of what the Rish Outfield of April 2019 would think of me now. Maybe he'd be jealous, and say, "Wow, you really do look less fat than I do. What's your secret?" And he'd be impressed I wrote a new Sidekick story, my Little Caesars story, and a bunch of Dead & Breakfasts (in his time, there was only one), but then he'd say, "What about Balms & Sears, did you finish that one?" He could ask about a handful of other projects in-progress, or worse, ask about stories, novellas, and the one unpublished novel, and whether I'd put those out there. He could also ask me about my social life, and if I actively see more than a single friend face-to-face a week. And I guess I'd have to admit that, even that has stopped, but it's not my fault, there's a disease going around that keeps people from going to other people's houses or to parties or clubs or bars or conc--
"Suuuuuure," 2019 Rish would say. "And Trump's going to get re-elected with numbers so high, they're close to what he claimed he won in 2016 by."
Hmmm.
But I think he'd be at least somewhat impressed, and at least somewhat proud of me, and I'd wish him the best of luck and suggest he buy up any Indominus Rex masks he could still find, because they'd sell for a hundred bucks apiece in a few months.
Gosh, I wonder what a conversation with the Rish Outfield of April 2021 would be like.
Sadly, I only managed eight hundred words tonight. I was just too tired, falling asleep three or four times while editing (and to be honest, fighting a dipping head while typing this). I recognized that it would only take about a hundred words to get me to a thousand, but I just couldn't manage. I told myself I'd write a hundred and eight words in the morning before I got out of bed.
Words Today: 892
Words In April: 20,728
P.S. I always post these each day.
I didn't grow up with this song. I first heard it while working on the show "Boston Public" in 2000 or 2001. I played a student in a class (I think it was a math class) and the teacher didn't show up, and Loretta Devine's character (Marla Hendricks) came in to substitute, and since she didn't know anything about the subject, she taught the students "Midnight Train" and had the girls sing one part and the boys sing the other. We must have gone through that song fifty times that day in Manhattan Beach, California. And since all of us were singing together, they don't consider that a line of dialogue, so we were all paid base non-union rates for it. But a couple of months later, I heard the Gladys Knight version on the radio and I perked right up. I STILL remembered the boys' part she had taught us in the faux class. And that's how I still sing it today.
Thanks, Loretta!
*The other day, Big asked me why I would even bother trying to get to a thousand words when I didn't explicitly have to. I didn't have a good answer for that other than, "Well, if you can do a thousand, then I sure as hell can."
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