July Sweeps - Day 165

I got nothing.

I was going to go outside and sit in the sun and force myself to write until I've got more words than yesterday.  It's doable, but boy, oh boy, oh boy, oh boy, ad infinitum, I don't want to.

I keep thinking about writing more "Lara and the Witch" stories in which Old Widow Holcomb teaches Lara's classmates little lessons, like she did in "Remember the Future."  It's actually a pretty decent set-up for a series of stories, maybe one on a girl who is too vain, maybe one on a boy who  tells Lara that love isn't real, maybe one on a teacher who forgets the names of his students, maybe one on a boy who likes to slap people on the ass.  The witch can be cruel and her curses can be over the top.  What's not to like?

Sit-ups Today: 111
Sit-ups In July: 2149

So now I'm sitting in the sun, semi-roasting, squinting at this screen.  I have zero words so far.

But the hot sun has a way of motivating, and before long, I started on my egg story (cleverly filenamed "Egg Story"), which I pretty much abandoned back in June.  I wrote a little, totally expendable romantic scene between the boy and the girl (one track mind, me), and decided--arbitrarily--that the story would take place in Washington state.  So, I put in a reference to the Seattle Supersonics, and a couple more bits about basketball, thinking I'd drop in a player's name when I got back inside the house.

My nephew adores basketball--it used to be his big thing, but once Plague Year 2020 hit, he has now shifted his obsession with the sport to fishing (which is much worse, believe me*)--and I asked him who the most famous player on the Supersonics is.  He looked at me like it was a trick question, and I said, "What?  Isn't that a team anymore?"  He told me they were the Oklahoma City Bagladies or something now, which makes less than zero sense, and so I said, "So, what's the team in Seattle called now?"  He told me there were none, so I had to substitute Portland for Seattle.

So, I Find and Replace-ed all the Supersonics references to Trailblazers, and then further discovered that Trail Blazers is two words, so that ended up helping my word count.  So, thanks, basketball.

Words Today: 984
Words In July: 11,643
Words I Would Need To Feel No Shame: 80,000

*He goes fishing multiple times a week, and just this one, he was casting a line and hooked his little brother in the back.  It went so deep in that their father couldn't get the hook out, and he had to go to the emergency room, where they cut the hook to force it out and gave him a tetanus shot.  So, yeah, fishing is worse.