November Sweeps - Day 302

So, one more day of writing, and I'll have done this for 300 days (I've already blogged 300 days in a row).  I got this.

In other news, STAR WARS actor David Prowse died today, another loss due to the pandemic.  He played Darth Vader in the Trilogy, the greatest pop culture character of my lifetime (unless you count Jack Deth in TRANCERS), and that's something.  Marshal and I will surely talk about him when we do our next episode.  He made the convention circuit over the last twenty years, and would always sign "Dave Prowse IS Darth Vader," which I really liked.

Now on with the countdown.

Sit-ups Today: 111
Sit-ups In November: 3399

My mom is always trying to dissuade me from going out running at night.  She worries that I will get run over or fall down and break something or, I dunno, run into thirsty Cenobites (her words, not mine).  "At least take along a rape whistle," she urges me.  And I never listen.

But two nights ago, her words came back to me as I was going around the same corner where I saw the ghosts, and a truck was right there, coming toward me . . . driving on the wrong side of the road.  Now, I don't know why they would be on the wrong side.  Maybe they were drunk, maybe they were texting, maybe there was a cat in their lane and they swerved to avoid it, or maybe they were Anglophiles, but they came right toward me, and only drove past because they didn't want to hit the parked car I was running alongside of.

It gave me pause, but not enough to stop running or not to run the next night.

But tonight, I was thinking a lot about it as I neared that corner, and went as far as to get up onto the sidewalk and run there for a while.  Big mistake, as there's no light under the trees overhanging the sidewalk, and suddenly, bap!, my foot hit a jutting-out slab of sidewalk, and down I went.  I biffed it hard onto the sidewalk, in the parlance of cool kids of my generation.*

My hands took the brunt of it, but my knee hit too, and I lay there for about a second thinking, "She can never know about this." But I also thought about Jackie Chan and Tom Cruise getting hurt doing their own stunts, so I got up and started on my way again.

I hobbled a little bit, though, and decided to just turn and head for home, not because I couldn't keep running, but because I probably shouldn't.

But as I made my retreat, I thought about Cruise and Chan, and on my headset, "Gonna Fly Now" by Bill Conti started playing.  So I turned around again and kept running, even though I'd fallen. Before long, my knee felt fine, I was running like normal again, and it was all good.  I didn't even really feel the cold.

When I get home, I told myself, I can take a picture of my bloodied hands, and everybody will think I'm tough.

Of course, now that I'm home, my palms are scuffed and pink, but don't look cool enough to take a picture of. 

I spent an hour or so on the couch watching "30 Rocks" (I keep meaning to put on another show--Jeff must've mentioned "The Good Place" three times during his visit, but I don't get around to it), and realized halfway through the second show** that the couch was super comfortable, like being molested by a marshmallow, and all I had to do was . . . close . . . my . . . eyes . . .

But that would've meant no writing today, at all, on day 299.

So I made myself get up and go to my room, and record a chapter of "My Friend of Misery," and that one chapter became three.  I FINALLY got to the end of Part 1, what I was going to send to Big so we could run it on the Dunesteef.  And that's at about the thirty-two thousand word mark (of now 42,000 words).

Look, I don't know if Big's a better writer than me, but he writes these gargantuan, nigh-unto-endless novels, with twice or thrice the word count of the longest thing I've ever written, and I simply can't do that.  Almost unquestionably, "My Friend of Misery" will end up the longest thing I've ever written, and it's just exhausting, way too long, maybe by triple, maybe by more.  And I'm sure it's rife with plotholes and inconsistencies, and the fact that I have had Brielle Montrose and her brother have the same conversation not only three times in a row, but all within about five chapters.  Maybe it's not good, but I have to proceed as though it is.  I have to, or all this work has been for nothing.  And chances are, if I like it and am passionate about it, then other people will like it too.

Maybe not, but I'm not giving up.

Words Today: 363
Words In November: 25,528

*Were they cool, though?  Was saying "biffed it" as asinine as saying "that's so sick" is today?

**I'm trying to binge the whole series, but there are three episodes they've removed from the rotation in 2020 because of culturally insensitive jokes (blackface) that makes them unstreamable.  I wish I had the strength to seek out those three episodes elsewhere, but I haven't bothered.  It's not like "Community," where the episode they made unavailable was the best episode of the entire series (or perhaps of all television shows ever), but I may be wrong and never ever know it.