As I said earlier this week...winter has come to your little town, Sheriff!
So I had the choice of going up to the cabin and potentially freezing, or staying home and making do as I normally do five days a week. I couldn't decide, because as much as I hate the cold, I love the silence, the opportunity to focus 100% on any given task--be it writing, editing, and recording, or for fun, watching a DVD, reading, sleeping, and dancing about like a castaway in "Lord of the Flies."
I drove up here (starting to fall asleep during the drive), and yeah, it's cold. There was snow on the ground, but it was dripping a little bit, and the temperature was in the forties rather than the thirties (which is cold, but I wouldn't say it's COLD). And I stopped when I saw that the lake had frozen over.
Right now, I'm sitting in my usual chair, watching the snow slide off the roof of the cabin next door. The fire is burning, but I can't feel its warmth.
I fully intend to finish the next Twilight Groan, and edit all of the "My Friend of Misery" chapters I recorded since my last visit here. Also, I ought to set finishing the faux-blog story "A Gallon A Day" (believe me, I've been racking my brain to find a better, cleverer title for it, but I can't think of an appropriate word that rhymes with "night" so far.
It's forty-two degrees inside the cabin (and forty-six degrees outside). That's not quite cold enough to see your breath, but it's cold enough that I type this with cold hands.
I made a fire almost immediately, because I decided one of the things I'd do this trip was empty out my car, and there are literally dozens/hundreds of bags, receipts, napkins, and action figure packages that would burn nicely (while I dance about like a William Golding character).
The fire is burning pretty well now, and produces plenty of heat across the room. Unfortunately, where I'm sitting, the cold is seeping through the window into my shirt, and it's grey and grim outside, the sun already setting. I need to get off my butt and go record a song, if I'm going to.
So, I went down to the lake, and the sun had already set. So, I just walked halfway up the ridge toward the dam, where snow made it hard to walk, and set up the tripod to record. And halfway through the first verse of "Leaving Town," the camera shut off and it said my storage was full.
Sigh. I do this about once in every four times, and sometimes I avoid it by checking my phone/deleting something before I go out there. Today, though, it was too late to do that (although it would've been better to arrive in the semi-dark with space to record than what happened). I deleted a bunch of files then, but it kept saying the phone was full. Big says the reason for that is that when you hit Delete on a picture or video, it puts it in a sort of Recycle Bin that you can't access on the phone, and only really deletes it after a few days. That really, really, really irritates me* and I ended up not getting to do my song, despite having driven all the way up there.
Plus, it was cold, and heading back to the car was no fun.
So, I just deleted a bunch of files off my phone by plugging it into my laptop and physically deleting videos, but it's a little too late, too late, too late tonight, as Def Leppard taught us.
Now the fire is going nice and warm again, but I'm still cold. I keep putting water in a pan, setting it on the stove, and then putting my hands in the water, but that's temporary, I guess I should just put my coat on (I remember coming here last year and having to sleep in my coat one night) and throw another log on the fire.
Push-ups Today: 81
Push-ups In August: 1904
I didn't want to do any sit-ups today either, which I chalk up to being sleepy, rather than being a lazy sack of horse nuggets. I think I'm going to go upstairs and do a hundred, though, just in case.
I've gotten absolutely no writing done today, and I just yawned good and hard. I didn't take a nap today at all, and I guess I'll be paying for it in an hour or so. But I need to write at least 300 words, and can really tackle it hard tomorrow.
I recently did an audio version for my 2014 novella "A Lovely Singing Voice," and it ended up being three hours and twenty minutes long (which is probably not long enough to release as its own audiobook, but could probably be released with another, similar story, as well as throwing it into a big audio collection), so I was curious how "My Friend of Misery" is faring. To my surprise, it's only one hour and twenty-six minutes, all edited together. When you think that I've been working on it over a month, that doesn't seem like much, does it?
I don't know that there's any real subtext in MFOM, but if I wanted to, I could put a lot more about Los Angeles and the film business and how people tend to lose their souls in the film industry. Brielle is a former child actor, and there are a couple of minor references to her wishing she could feel special like she did when she was on television. That's something that you hear the child stars, from Danny Bonaduce to Mara Wilson, from Corey Feldman to Michael Jackson, say, that they miss the limelight once it's gone, and will do anything to feel like they did when they were kids, and everyone paid attention to them, and it seemed like the good times would never end.
Late, late in the book, Brielle gets a part in a play, and gets to feel, just a little bit, what she felt as a kid, before she blew it and had to become a regular person. Her brother Brent becomes successful enough that people approach him in the mall for autographs, and that eats her up inside. Of course, Brent becomes pretty corrupt as the story goes on, and I could easily say, "See, this is what Hollywood does to a person." Maybe I'll touch on that in rewrites, or it's possible I already do.
I remember watching an interview with the parents of a very successful child actor, and how they had other kids, and were grooming them to be replacement meal tickets for when the currently-popular one reached the awkward age. I remember thinking there was something super predatory about that, almost like they were making the children specifically to cash in on the family name. I might be putting that a bit harshly, but I also could've said "they were making the children specifically to prostitute them out." Not untrue.
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| One of my favorite SNL sketches ("America's Most Wanted: Former Child Actors") |
Sit-ups Today: 111
Sit-ups In October: 4107
I spent a good half hour cleaning out my car today. It was something I did on a lark, turning on my phone and hitting a song at random and saying, "I'm going to clean out the back seat of the car while this song plays." But then, the song ended, and I wasn't even close to done, so I went through another song and another and took a metric ton of garbage out of the back of my car. There was a jacket and another blanket buried under all that, along with more trash and toys than you could find in Mattel's dumpster.
For the first time since 2018, the back of my car looks alright . . . but I'm just going to have to put all of that garbage back in when I leave tomorrow (or Friday--I might stay half a day on Friday, if the work hasn't piled up), and that will ruin everything. I found a book of Conan the Barbarian stories by Robert E. Howard in the pile of books behind the driver's seat, and I wish I had found it last week.
You see, I had got it into my head to record another of the Conan stories to present on my show, since they're in the public domain and all. But on Sunday night, I looked it up, to determine if ALL the Conan stories are free, or if only some of them are. And it turns out . . . none of them are. Because of the new copyright laws, the Conan stories don't become public domain until 2024 and beyond. And I guess that's why there haven't been dozens of Conan movies, like there are Tarzan movies, and if I recorded one for the show, it wouldn't technically be any different than me doing a Stephen King story.
Except King's stories aren't in the public domain everyplace else in the world except America.
Words Today: 554
Words In October: 27,810
So, this will be my month with the fewest words since I started this, but I don't feel like a failure in the slightest. About the writing, I mean--hey, I feel like a failure 365 days a year--and one extra in 2020, but the writing is fine. I knew that my priorities would have to shift a little bit this month (and even more in November), and as long as I wrote every day, at least 300 words, I'm on task. And I had the two trips to the library this week where I pounded out almost five thousand words, and that certainly helped my total.
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