I have accomplished so very little today. My regular alarm just went off, and now it's after ten, and I'm sort of at a loss where all the hours went. I woke up super early again, the sky still dark, and like last time, I only woke up long enough to make sure it wasn't freezing in here (the fire had gone out during the night, and there was still an unburned log in there--the fresh ones I stacked the other day are too fresh, and they even hiss when they start to burn, if I can get them to burn at all), then I went back to sleep.
Still, I woke up early, took this picture of the morning sky:
and started my day. I ate two donuts, showered, finished editing chapter 5 of "My Friend of Misery," then I started looking at my Documents file to see if there was anything I wanted to write on, like an abandoned project or something.
I dug up my Little Caesar's Pizza story from earlier this year (which I did finish, but needs a polish, and none of the characters have last names (right now it's just Brandon ___ and Kenna ____ and Meeshelle ____ and Sanford ____ and Eli _____). I just gave Kenna the last name Phillips, but the others are still blanks. I ought to come up with something, but I'll probably never put the story out there, even though I read a couple of pages this morning and really liked the dissolution of the boys' friendship. A bigger deal than the last names (which really could be anything) is that I don't have a title for the story.
Big called his--rather brilliantly--"Little Caesar's Ghost." My working title was "Pizza! Pizza!" (which was--and may still be--the slogan to Little Caesars) but I ended up changing it from being a LCP to being Fat Ian's Pizza, the chain I refer to in a dozen of my stories, having named it after my friend in college, who was super offended by that detail. But now that it's set in a fictional pizza place in a fictional town, the only thing that's coming to me is that it's about two guys, a girl, and a pizza place. And I ain't going there.*
The family of deer that hang out next door are back again. I don't know that I've seen them literally every time I've been here, but I practically have. In fact, the two fawns are now double the size they were the first time I noticed them, and that's pretty amazing. There are only three that I see now, though there are usually four.
I got up to take a picture, but the click of the door lock unlatching was enough to send them running. It is deer hunting season right now, but it's a very rare year when a hunter would shoot a doe or a fawn. Although dude, I don't know. Sometimes people just want to shoot things, regardless of the rules or whether they want a trophy or the meat.
I finished editing Chapter 5 of "My Friend of Misery," and then saw I had no more chapters recorded. Nothing more to edit there. I should've planned ahead and done a couple more chapters for this trip. Now all I have to do is write or read. Poor poor pitiful me, as the man said.
Darn, that remind me: I still haven't done my Zevon episode. Okay, today I'll do it. Maybe.
Everything is yellow and brown out here. There was a mile or so stretch where everything had turned various shades of those two colors, even the mountain, and I thought about pulling over and trying to do a song in front of it. But the sound would be terrible beside Highway 89, and I'd end up chickening out before I'd even gotten my tripod set up yet.**
It's cold outside, even though the sun is shining, and I figured I'd make a fire and finish reading my book sitting near it (I've got one chapter left). But first, I decided to go outside and gather up as much kindling as I could, so I'd have plenty for the next visit, when it might be much, much colder than today (it's supposed to get down to well below freezing this weekend, with a low of eighteen degrees in the city, and I think that would put it in the single digits out here). I filled the box (and even took a picture of it, because I'm stupid that way--like the Instagram girls that take pictures of what they had for lunch. Don't they know we're there for half-naked selfies?), and tried to start a fire, but it promptly went out.
I don't look forward to next week, when my hands will be shaking hard enough to not be able to light a match. But at least I'll have plenty of wood.
I finished reading my book, started on a new one, and fell asleep partway through the first chapter. I slept hard enough that I dreamed, and it is pretty vivid to me now, even though they always fade, with me in some kind of condo or apartment, attempting to do a Storage Unit Serenade, but getting interrupted as more and more people showed up as I was trying. Eventually, I broke something--it was in my mind a minute ago, a remote control train or helicopter--belonging to my nephew, and I took it upon myself to fix it, and it became a destructive farce like THE MONEY PIT, as I kept bumping things, scratching things, and breaking things in the apartment, while trying to repair the toy, and more and more kids (including my Uncle John's children) showed up to tell me I was doing it wrong. Eventually, my Uncle Jerry, who can fix anything, took me aside and said, "You are not helping. The repairs are going to be extensive. Just buy a new train." And I told him no, that I could fix this, that I could fix everything, and then backed into a china cabinet, just hard enough that one of the shelves gave way, and they started crashing down behind me.
So, I got up, and moaned because I knew I had wasted hours asleep, only to discover that it had been a half hour or less that I had been sleeping, and there was still plenty of day left.
I sat down here to start editing a short story or two (this is one I had written for a contest, and recorded, knowing I could use it in a collection, or an Outcast if it didn't win), and as I was waiting for it to open and noise reduce, I reflected on the fact that, just a month or two ago, I mused about the nature of love, and that, if Lara Demming ever found a boyfriend who seemed too good to be true, how could she ever trust that it was real, knowing that she had magical abilities, and lived with a witch so powerful, she could probably cause Mike Pence to fall in love with a leather-clad abortion doctor.
And here we are, the week before Halloween, and I've written it. There's a third "Lara and the Witch" story, a fifth "Sidekick Chronicles" story, and a fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth "Dead & Breakfast" story, all written this year. And now I've started a third Will Choner story . . . part of me never wants to stop doing this.*** Oh, and "Hatchling" is in the upper thirty thousand word range, which would make it a novel, if I felt like spending a couple of months turning it into an audiobook (and why wouldn't I?) . . . so that's pretty neat (did I honestly never do a word count before? I should have--it feels good to see those numbers).
I also looked over "Never Let Him Go," the next-to-be-published story in the haunted bed and breakfast series. It is the least consequential story I've written, dealing mostly with Mrs. Bice's decision to fire Mason Bradley, and the obstacles--almost supernatural-seeming--that keep preventing her from doing so. In it, there's a female day clerk without a name that has to tell Bice that the man she was interviewing to replace Mason has canceled his appointment, and that sort of surprised me, as I had never established a female day clerk between the hot European twin (I think her name was Trudi) and Meeshelle, who is hired in the next story, "Meet the New Clerk."
After opening the "Hatchling" document, I was reminded that I always intended to write a scene where Rick, the teenaged protagonist, talks to his new girlfriend Talia's father. That was the character I had based on me, rather than the rather studly, popular Rick (after all, his name is Rick. Can you believe that? I might have first named him that as a placeholder, the name is so cringe-worthy, but it just stuck, using it three hundred-plus times in the story [I know, the word counter told me]), and I tried to imagine what kind of father I would be, to a teenaged daughter, especially one that was just starting to go out on dates.
So I decided that Talia's dad would be the friendliest, most supportive father you could imagine, who wants his daughter to find joy and experience life, more than he wants her to stay a little girl forever. And so he's totally welcoming to Rick and the relationship, and gives his daughter money so they can buy condoms, rather than give the whole "don't you ever look at my baby as anything other than a lady" speech that I think we've all heard, either in person or through the grapevine.
And I always meant to write a scene where the two of them talk, and Rick expects the hostile, almost threatening lecture, but instead gets warmth and compliments, which is exactly what he needs to hear, since his own dad is out of the picture. If this were a novel instead of just a lengthy short story, I'd have him go to Mr. Giller for advice while the romance blooms, and then be unable to do so once he and Talia have broken up, and that's a double heartbreak. It just seems like a neat little subplot, in a story that has one or two that don't really go anywhere.
So, I sat down and wrote that scene just now, and I'm tempted to put a later reference to it, or at least to the man's first name, which I had to invent for the scene, and will never be mentioned again. It was Bert (short for Hubert, though I never reveal that).
Writing is fun, but it's also pretty nuanced. I have criticized the Orson Scott Card book I just finished enough (or I will when the episode I talk about it airs--it's the show with my story "Gatekeeper" in it), but his unrealistic-as-fuck dialogue really took a toll on me in this one. There was one sentence spoken by a fourteen year old girl that was so dense, I had to read it aloud, remarking that my buddy Jeff, a middle-aged man with a 190 IQ, would never manage something like that.
I was skimming through the manuscript (of "Hatchling"), trying to fill in all the blank lines that I found. Sometimes, when I'm in the middle of writing, and I can't think of the perfect word, I'll write a word that is like the one I'm looking for, and in all-caps, will put (BETTER WORD) after it in parenthesis. Or other times, I'll just put a blank line there and go on with the writing, because you can ruin your momentum looking for the perfect word or reaching for a thesaurus (although, cards on the table, I haven't needed a thesaurus since college . . . not because I'm that smart, but because computers and the internet have made them obsolete).
In this case, Talia is telling Rick they can sell the hatchling to a museum, then she says, "Or, if you're too ____, you can just donate him." Then she insults him, because all he is is a horny teenager. Oh, this is when they're at the end of their relationship, so there should be some kind of cold judgment in her comment (I liked developing a friendship that became a romance that became an enmity that became a friendship again). I wanted a word like "honorable" or "righteous," but didn't like either of those.
I realize that this may be supremely boring to you, but I'm blogging about something, every day for nearly a year, and I need the content. So, I walked around the cabin, cleaning things up (there's always tons of ash coming out of the stove when I throw more wood or paper in, and I'm much more tidy here than anywhere else, even though no one's going to see it), trying to figure out the perfect word for Talia to say. See, she is smart and Rick is less-than, so I wanted it to be a pretty good word.
I remember, back in 1998, when "Dawson's Creek" started up (at least I think that was the year--I didn't watch it when it began) that Kevin Williamson explained the way that he had his characters talk on that show. He said, and I'm paraphrasing, "You know how you'll have an argument with someone, and afterward you say to yourself, 'I SHOULD have said this,' or 'I should have said that?' Well, my characters actually say those things, in the spur of the moment, in the middle of their conversations." I never forgot that, and I have to admit that it does affect my writing, from time to time.
Though, in my defense, I often try to purposely dumb down my characters' dialogue, putting in "you knows" and "likes" and having them get the references wrong. The first time I did this was in "Round and Round," when I have the main character mistakenly refer to Stevie Nicks as a man. I liked that so much, I've done it a hundred times since, with no signs of stopping.
Anyway, I was folding sheets when it came to me: principled. It gave me a little thrill to run over to the laptop and fill in the blank, like I had found the answer to the last space in the crossword puzzle. Despite it taking me two months to get there.
Well, the time has come to leave once again. This has been pretty amazing--two trips to the cabin in a week (although it's no different, technically, than the weeks before, since I didn't come up on last Wednesday and Thursday), and lots of reading, writing, editing, and recording. I can pack everything up with my head held high, knowing it was another productive visit, and I'll still have time to do my sit-ups and run tonight before it's time to record a Dunesteef with Big.
I hope you have productive days and weekends ahead, and that you can feel good about yourself, even if you accomplish less than I do, hard to believe as that sounds.
Push-ups Today: 76
Push-ups In October: 1434
Sit-ups Today: 111
Sit-ups In October: 3398
Words Today: 1299 (now that's strange, I had 1299 words on Wednesday. I'm tempted to add a single word just to make it different)
Words In October: 19,499
*You see, if your life has been better spent than mine, you wouldn't be aware that there was a sitcom on ABC in the late Nineties (maybe it was in 2000) called "A Girl, Two Guys, and a Pizza Place" or something brazenly similar to that. It was not successful, though I do vaguely recall that one of the guys was a pre-fame Ryan Reynolds. In a way, it would be clever to call it "Two Guys, A Girl, and a Pizza Place," but I just can't make myself go there.
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| Gosh, I wonder what was on NBC Thursday nights at this time. |
**And I'm reminded of people like Abigail Hilton, who always seemed to accomplish what they set out to do, or that bloodless alien Brandon Sanderson, writing another over-long Epic Fantasy novel I will never, ever touch, in just the period between it getting dark at seven but getting dark later and it getting dark at seven but getting dark earlier, and how jealous I was of that. But now I see how they do it--they commit to it, and they do it every day.
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