August Sweeps - Day 192

This may (or may not) be entertaining to you, but last night, I did my evening run, and as I neared the house where I saw the ghost last week . . . the streetlight on the corner went out.  Okay, that's an exaggeration--it went out as I was rounding the corner, long before I reached the house, but the point is, the whole front yard of the haunted house was engulfed in darkness.  And I couldn't help but remember seeing that girl standing there, and how she was gone a moment later.

And as I ran past, for a second there--just a second, mind you--I saw her: a white-faced girl dressed in white, lunging out of the shadows at me.  I literally leapt into the air, made a startled sound, and ran into the middle of the street to get away from her.

Now look, I KNOW that she wasn't really there, that I imagined her because of that faulty brain of mine.  But my adrenaline hit anyway and I ran super fast away from the house, laughing at myself while my armhairs danced and the two boys went to ground.  I nearly stopped and texted my niece about it because it amuses her endlessly that I claim to have seen a ghost and am now afraid of that front yard, but instead, I just tried to put it out of my mind and concentrate on writers block and unrequited love--you know, the normal things in life.

Not sure if that was worth sharing, but hey, there you go.

And speaking of which . . . I had a bit of a waste of time that I very nearly recorded a video about.  Instead, I did a mini-podcast.  Enjoy?

Today, while I was doing my sit-ups, my three year old nephew tried to do them with me.  After a moment, I grabbed him, sat him on my chest, and did sit-ups with him as a human weight.  He seemed to really what to him was probably a game, and it made the sit-ups slightly harder.  Win-win.

Sit-ups Today: 150
Sit-ups in August: 2192

I keep thinking that the moment this daily writing thing dries up, I'll get a ton of stuff published--short stories, podcasts, audiobooks, videos, etc..  But the truth is, I think I'd find something to trip me up, even then (like watching that new "Perry Mason" show, which I keep not getting to).

Big told me that he is mere days away from achieving his goal for the year of writing 300,000 words.  While I am not at all threatened by that, it did make me wonder how many words I had written this year.  Unfortunately, there's no way of knowing.

I didn't start writing until midnight or so, and wrote a bit where Rick tries to talk to Talia post-break-up, and it doesn't go well.*  It was a short scene, and not very good.  But then I wrote the intro to what I'm assuming is the climax, where Talia tells Rick there's a fire and they go to investigate it together.  This scene worked a lot better, and before I knew it, it was a little after one, and I had . . . 996 words.  Dang, only four under a thousand.

So, I sat down and changed the line "She glanced in the direction of Egg Hill," to "She glanced in the direction of what they had come to call Egg Hill," and thought that was good enough.  But then I wrote another paragraph and a couple lines of dialogue.  Even better.

Words Today: 1112
Words in August: 9829

*This goes without saying, but I find it way easier to write from Rick's point-of-view than from Talia's.  Rick is a dumb guy, so it's easy to have him say stupid things, or impulsive things, that gets him in trouble.  But Talia is smart, so the stuff she says is (unfairly) harsher, even meaner.  I'm not making apologies here, but I do worry that a reader will say, "Why is Talia such a bitch when Rick is such a nice guy?"  
Maybe they will say that.  It doesn't really bother me.  The thing is, Talia's not a bitch at all (despite having a dad who named her after a Batman villain), but she handles the break-up in a different way than Rick does, and she leans toward being like me a little bit more than Rick does (despite her being smart and working hard in school).  I may have to do another pass of the story before I put it out there (ugh, now I've got to come up with cover art.  Hopefully I can just ask Gino to make me a Photoshop of an egg with interesting markings and avocado-like texture).  But at least we're moving closer to the end of another project (something like this would've taken me a year or more in my younger days).