September Sweeps - Day 213

I nearly didn’t get my words yesterday.  But I forced myself to, even going so far as to get up and do a few more sit-ups just to get my heartrate up.  I guess that’s when you know whether you mean to be a writer, when the rubber hits the road.  I wish I were finished with this story.  It’s not very good.  Oh, in my head, it was sweet and fun and exciting, but in practice, not so much.  Regardless, it’s better to finish it and move on than give up this far in.  Plus, one day I won’t want to write anymore “Dead & Breakfast” stories, and it’s best to get them in while I can.

Today was my early day, and once again I semi-blew it.  Last night I stayed up till nearly three trying to write while battling sleep (ironic, that), and when the alarm went off, my first thought was, “Oh, hell no!” in an impression of every single movie Will Smith has ever made.  So I leaned over and told my alarm to wake me up a half hour later.  But it didn’t.  It says it will wake me up tomorrow at that time.

I had some overdue DVDs to return to the library, and went up to the second floor for the first time in a while, plopping myself down at a desk to do some writing.  I got in about a thousand words on the story, quite easily, and only barely noticed the mask this time.  It's only 2:42pm, and I've gotten my writing done, which is a bit of a relief.

Of course, it's the first of a new month, and I need to look over what my August goals were, then finish my Patreon address (I recorded most of it on Thursday night) and make some new goals.  

I went to the library, got it done.  What a relief.  I'll have to do that a couple more times this month.  Wearing the mask while writing isn't so bad.

Also, I set some goals for the month of September, and one of them (in addition to writing and sit-ups every day) is to do at least 25 push-ups daily.  So, you're going to see something like this every day this month:

Push-Ups Today: 25
Push-Ups In September: 25

Sit-ups Today: 100
Sit-ups In September: 100

My cousin and I went and saw TENET tonight, in a theater, only two months later than it was supposed to come out.  Christopher Nolan is so brave to set out to make an action movie for adults that makes you think and concentrate like that.  It's doubtful it'll make all that much money in the theaters (compared to what it would've made in a non-plague year), but I hope it makes plenty of money, and that John David Washington goes from being "Denzel Washington's kid" to being "That guy that was in TENET."  We'll see.

They could even make a sequel, if they wanted to (not that I think they will, but it's sort of a James Bond film with time travel elements, and that sounds like a franchise-worth of possibilities), and I have little doubt that there were ideas he had for this movie that didn't make it into the final film, but could pop up again in a second one (kind of like the nightclub fight and the mine car scenes from Kasdan's script for RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, that showed up in TEMPLE OF DOOM). 

Regardless, I thought about it a little, and that kind of story is beyond me, but seeing something like that makes me aspire to tell more stories, and stretch as an artist.*  

Words Today: 1113

(I'm tempted to cut out two words for the day, just to keep everything consistent, but I'm pretty sick that way)

*Afterward, my cousin came over and we watched the first episode of "Lovecraft Country," an HBO Civil Rights Horror series produced by both Jordan Peele and J.J. Abrams.  I don't think he enjoyed it nearly as much as I did (and I didn't enjoy it as much as I hoped I would, partly because of the subject matter), but I had told him about it, saying, "I don't know what it's about exactly, but I THINK it's about a guy who meets a girl and she comes from some remote little Southern town, and he goes looking for her at her parents' place, even though he's not supposed to, and it turns out she lives in a town where monsters are real."  And I told him, "That might not be the actual story behind the show . . . but if it isn't, then I'm going to write that story, because it's great."

I still feel that way, and "Lovecraft Country" is different enough from that (the main character's father goes missing in some part of Massachusetts that's so rural it doesn't appear on any maps, and it turns out that it's a part of the world where monsters are real . . . all amid the worst aspects of the lives of black people in 1950's America) as to make the point fairly moot.  Even if we keep watching the show, I owe it to myself to at least consider writing that story, 'cause it's fire-emoji, as the idiot millennials say.