Lately, my relatives have expressed amazement that I go to the family cabin every week. In this world where people can't get out and socialize, have far fewer appointments than before, and sometimes don't even have their jobs, and a guy who drives into the woods alone every Wednesday surprises them.
It looks like next Wednesday is out, though, so this'll be my last trip up until the end of the month, which--gasp!--will be here in only a day or two. Make the best of it, folks, hug your loved ones tight, because the sands in Rish's hourglass are spilling out in both directions.
The sit-ups don't seem to be helping either.
Sit-ups Today: 216
Sit-ups In July: 1264
I didn't get to the cabin until three o'clock, but that couldn't be helped. Well, I suppose it could have--my uncle from Vegas woke me up at about 6:51am when he let his dog out to go to the bathroom, and I could've forced myself to get up then and start my day, so I'd have been finished with everything before eleven--but I had wanted to get lunch with my cousin, so that meant meeting him around one, and heading south after that.
I don't know how into detail I went about the phone yesterday, except that I didn't spend forty dollars for a case for it. I did spend forty for one of those glass screen covers, which, come on, should cost ten dollars at the outset, but I told the salesgirl that I've never cracked a phone in all the years that I've had them, so I'd be okay. I meant to order me a case off of Amazon or eBay, and just be careful with the phone until it came. But whoops, when I got to the cabin and I opened the back door, the bag of groceries I'd brought up spilled out, and as I leaned over to pick them up, my phone fell out of my pocket and--bap!--cracked on the side. I can't help but feel that they're overly fragile by design, but that doesn't make me feel any better about it.
It did upset me, and the thought of taking the new phone out there to take pictures and try to take video this evening is kind of terrifying to me now (my old phone took many tumbles, even a couple during recordings, and the case always protected it--but it never fell into the water or anything, which this new one could easily do, since it's so big and appeared to have been constructed of eggshell and tissue paper. But I've got an idea:
I'll simply take my old phone and use it to record today. Yeah, I recognize that I got a new phone specifically so I could make videos and take pretty pictures with it--but I can wait a week or two until a case comes, and just live with the crack in it until either it dies or I do. Besides, I think my old phone would appreciate not being retired just yet, kinda like one of those movies where the old guy is able to beat the young guy, because the old guy is smarter.
Words Today: 1059
Words In July: 7133
My daily word count is lagging way behind Big Anklevich's (every ten days or so, I enter my numbers on our shared spreadsheet on Google Docs, and he's almost ten thousand ahead of me, quite an upset from when we started and I'd double his numbers each day), but I have to constantly remind myself that my goal isn't to write a thousand words a day or to beat the numbers from last month, it's just to keep going. And keep going I am (and I call myself a writer?).
Point in fact: I finished "Podcatcher" before the sun even went down. I mean, of course I finished it before the sun went down, since I was always scared to write it at night (was that it? Was it fear? Why didn't I just finish it in November or December?--I was writing then, and far more connected to it than I am now--and why did I impose that dumb rule of only writing it in the cabin? It would be out there, and probably an episode of the Outcast by now otherwise. I really don't get it).
This year (Plague Year 2020) has not been one for letting my imagination get away with me and freaking out at night out here, even a little. It's weird because, a couple of weeks ago, I actually had a nightmare that took place here in the cabin, with me in the couch (though of course, it was an alternate universe version of the cabin, where everything was in a slightly different place, and I was confused about how I had gotten here), and even that didn't get me really spooked. I suspect it's that having a mid-life crisis, which could go one and on, I suppose, is scarier than imagining boogeymen or witches standing outside the window.
But back to "Podcatcher." It's about nine thousand words long and might expand just a little, but I don't think so. When I came up with it, back in October or so, it was meant to end with a cliffhanger, just one of those "Oh shit" moments at about the five thousand word mark. But I got some criticism of a story I wrote right before that one, and decided to try and actually come up with an ending for it . . . which also made it easy to just abandon the sucker.
But it's done now, and that means I can move on. In a way, "Podcatcher*" is awfully similar to my Halloween decoration story, which I mean to work on in an hour or so. Both deal with otherworldly, supernatural threats, that remain entirely undefined, which in my experience, is supposed to make them scarier. At the same time, I wrote a story years ago, where there was one of these otherworldly, supernatural threats, and what it wanted was to impregnate unwary teenage girls . . . and isn't that way more terrifying than something that wants an undefined thing?
Well, your mileage may vary.
It's totally possible that the story doesn't work at all. I've run into that with my writing over and over--stuff that I feel strongly about while I'm writing it doesn't necessarily come out the way I thought it was coming out in my head. Or, conversely, take a story like "Try Your Luck," which I've spent twenty years thinking was goofy and laughable, turned out way better in 2020 than I'd ever given it credit for. While something like "Round and Round," proclaimed by friends of mine to be the Best Thing You've Ever Written, didn't really grab me so much in 2020. And I might as well mention the third of those stories, "Father's Day In August," which I recognized in 2005 had some problematic areas, then revisited in 2020 with the discovery that it wasn't good at all . . . well, somebody wrote me the other day to tell me how much they liked that story, and called it one of my best.
Hmm.
Since I've got nothing better to do, I figured I'd check out my total number of words since I started on February 1st . . . 190,732 words. Take that.
I went for my usual walk around the lake as the sun was setting, and took the first pictures with the new phone. I was afraid to do video with it, though, because I didn't figure out a way to perch it on my tripod without it falling off (actually, I do have video footage of it falling off and me catching it, but nobody wants to see that).
The lake:
The field behind the lake:
The pond that used to be part of the lake:
*Which, as I've recognized, is a terrible title (the document itself is titled "Comes the Podcatcher," which may actually be worse), and I toyed with calling it "There Are Such Things," from the deleted ending to 1931's DRACULA, but decided that that would make a much better title for a short story collection someday, one with stories about monsters and ghosts and vampires and whatever the deuce a podcatcher is. I'll keep thinking.
It's totally possible that the story doesn't work at all. I've run into that with my writing over and over--stuff that I feel strongly about while I'm writing it doesn't necessarily come out the way I thought it was coming out in my head. Or, conversely, take a story like "Try Your Luck," which I've spent twenty years thinking was goofy and laughable, turned out way better in 2020 than I'd ever given it credit for. While something like "Round and Round," proclaimed by friends of mine to be the Best Thing You've Ever Written, didn't really grab me so much in 2020. And I might as well mention the third of those stories, "Father's Day In August," which I recognized in 2005 had some problematic areas, then revisited in 2020 with the discovery that it wasn't good at all . . . well, somebody wrote me the other day to tell me how much they liked that story, and called it one of my best.
Hmm.
Since I've got nothing better to do, I figured I'd check out my total number of words since I started on February 1st . . . 190,732 words. Take that.
I went for my usual walk around the lake as the sun was setting, and took the first pictures with the new phone. I was afraid to do video with it, though, because I didn't figure out a way to perch it on my tripod without it falling off (actually, I do have video footage of it falling off and me catching it, but nobody wants to see that).
The lake:
The field behind the lake:
The pond that used to be part of the lake:
*Which, as I've recognized, is a terrible title (the document itself is titled "Comes the Podcatcher," which may actually be worse), and I toyed with calling it "There Are Such Things," from the deleted ending to 1931's DRACULA, but decided that that would make a much better title for a short story collection someday, one with stories about monsters and ghosts and vampires and whatever the deuce a podcatcher is. I'll keep thinking.
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