My sister told me she and her kids are going to Vegas on Thursday, and won't be back until Monday or so. That made me think I ought to do something myself, rather than just watch TV with the volume up.
My usual group of high school friends are getting together on Wednesday night, and even though I desperately (shoot, let me put that in all-caps--DESPERATELY) don't want to go, that happens every single time they get together. And then (except for one time, when I was working), when I force myself to go, I have a good time and am glad I went. Until the next year.
So, my thinking is that I'll stay here and work on Wednesday and Thursday, hopefully getting everything done so I can hit the cabin on Friday, for the regular weekend. That will mean there will be other people up there, probably running around and screaming and making fun of me for having my shirt off on the back deck. Or at least running their generator. But I think that's what I'll do.
Push-ups Today: 65
Push-ups In October: 661 (I'm not going to be able to keep doing this the way I'm doing it. I guess I need to do more exercise to build up my arms so it doesn't kill me to go past fifty or so push-ups [some days it's fewer!]. But I'm not Big Anklevich--it is a monumental achievement to have built up my muscles to where they are; I can't dedicate ninety minutes daily to it . . . nor would I want to)
Sit-ups Today: 150
Sit-ups In October: 1626 (the sit-ups are no problem. I can now do a hundred in a row without serious difficulty, and the only thing keeping me from doing more is that I am easily bored. Hence, when I'm at the cabin, with not so many distractions, I can do them spread out through the day)
I saw a t-shirt with Munch's Scream on it today, and considered buying it, even if I only wore it when I went running. It was a ladies shirt, unfortunately, and even though it was a Large, I worried I could not fit into it. So I took a photo instead.
I got ready to do my nightly run, after having worked until midnight or so (Sunday nights are the biggest night for selling junk online), and realized that I had done no writing yet (you gotta start over at zero every day, which is absolutely soul-crushing sometimes). So I decided to do fifty more sit-ups, and then get to writing. I finished writing the break-up scene in my Lara story, and was about to go to the big confrontation between her and the witch (which was the first scene I wrote when I came up with the story this summer), but decided to eat some ice cream instead.
But eating ice cream involves mostly sitting around, so I decided to put on a movie while I did so. The night before, I had watched ten minutes or so of DON'T BREATHE, the Fede Alvarez-directed home invasion movie produced by my man Sam Raimi, but I couldn't stay awake. So I resumed DON'T BREATHE, and wouldn't you know it, I sat there for the whole darn thing.
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| Wow, is this a great poster! |
The movie is absolutely remarkable in that it takes the unthinkable position of presenting the three home invaders as the good guys and the blind military veteran, whose house they break into to rob, as the bad guy. Over and over again, I told myself, "This should not work. How am I enjoying this?" The filmmakers cheat a bit by casting the lovable Jane Levy as the female thief and the huge, grizzled Stephen Lang as the blind man (literally "The Blind Man" in the credits), and by showing that he has done A Bad Thing, it's okay to root against him. Still, the film was expertly done and imminently watchable* and I don't even feel bad I did that instead of writing.
Words Today: 573
Words In October: 10,076
I did another chapter of "My Friend of Misery," and dang, it's just not very good.
Oh, I know I say that about everything (don't I?), but with my first book "Into the Furnace," I remember thinking, This isn't long enough, not This isn't good enough . . . or at all. My second novel, "The Calling: Reunion," never gave me any qualms or doubts. In fact, if you told me that you read it, and it was really, really shitty, I'd be surprised to hear it. I was recording Chapter 6 of MFOM, and I heavily rewrote it, taking more than an hour to record a very short section, because it didn't seem to be working.
But hey, that's what rewrites are for. And once the book's done, you can focus on things like keeping the characters consistent, or zeroing in on a theme, or creating a rhythm and a pace, or not using the same phrases over and over.
With this in mind, it's good that I got some writing/re-writing in, and the word count of the book creeps closer and closer to novel-length. Right now, it's 37.5K long, and I haven't even gotten to the section I thought could use some work. Exciting, no?
*There's one brilliant sequence where the Blind Man has cut the power to his house, so everything is pitch black, but Alvarez shoots it in gauzy black and white with the sighted characters wearing big black contact lenses so their pupils look dilated . . . and it's just masterfully done, despite it defying what should work in a movie.
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