I've got a headache again today. I can't believe this. This must be what my nephew goes through all the time (except his range from painful to absolutely debilitating, and mine is just trying its best to ruin my day).
I went to the library yesterday and recreated the lost writing session (and like when it happened to me last week, I wasn't able to replicate my work exactly, but just wrote the same two story points in a slightly different way, trying DESPERATELY not to dwell on the fact that this was all a big waste of time, that soon I'll be dead, and nobody will care one way or another how this story went, and was this the best use of the time I have left, when I could just be watching YouTube, or slightly better, lying down and reading a book?). It didn't take a lot of time, but there's no way I'm going to finish this story by the end of the year (not that that's my endgame, or even one of my monthly goals), though I am starting to get to the bit that appeals to me: where the main character (Clayton) starts to realize that the plague he's witnessing is not going to get better, and soon, there may be no one left.
Then I'll get to write the whole point of the thing: what does Clayton do when there is no one left but him* and becomes, in essence, the Last Man On Outpost 3.
I should be working right now. I've gotten practically nothing done this morning, and my desktop computer was so slow that I realized I'd have to turn it off and turn it back on. But experience has taught me that I always lose something when that happens (heck, my laptop taught me that lesson a day ago!), so I went through and tried to save every one of the dozen Word files that were currently open (Audio Collections in progress, the file for "A Sidekick's Errand" that I'm revising in preparation for publishing, two short stories I'm writing Author's Notes for, two Dead & Breakfast stories that need to have links to the other published installments put in, an attempt at writing a birthday card for my muse that I'll never end up sending, and a story called "Roll With The Changes" that I like but when I read it aloud I thought I ought to add a section to).
Now it is rebooting (has taken about fifteen minutes so far) and is doing an update that is currently at 31%, so I might as well write this blogpost.
Did I mention I have a headache?
Pardon the profanity, but it's currently effing lunchtime, and I had errands I needed to run this afternoon, but I haven't gotten any of my morning work done, so I don't feel like I can stop for lunch (though, had I known that rebooting my computer would take half an hour, I could've eaten lunch while waiting for it to start up again). But my headache rages on, and I'm hazily cognizant that it's 1:04pm and my caffeine withdrawal may be about to kick in, or may be already contributing to my headache, so I really ought to get some kind of lunch, even if it's just microwaving a burrito** and chugging half a can of Coke Zero.
Goddamn computer is still not booted up, and it's 1:06. Guess I'll keep typing.
My nephew (now 10) didn't get to go to school this week or last because of testing positive for COVID-19, despite not having any symptoms (he can even smell and taste, the lucky bugger), and he's been home, watching television for the last ten days or so (this is the last week of school before Christmas break, so he actually doesn't have to go back to school until January). Sometimes it doesn't bother me the shows he watches, like "The Loud House" or _______*** (I'll think of something when my headache goes away). But he often watches this super-grating asshole play video games on YouTube, filling every possible second of his videos with yelling commentary, and that absolutely blows. When my mom sees him watching this, she goes nuts, becoming her mother yelling at me about reading "libros satánicos," which is how she described "IT" by Stephen King.
But worse, my nephew has started (today and yesterday) to watch the "Pokemon" cartoon, and when Pikachu does his brain-piercing chatter ("Pika! Pikapika!") I want nothing more than to kick the set in. Honestly, if somebody gave me the choice between never having to hear that hellish voice or seeing a random TikTok performer's boobies, I'd struggle with the decision. Maybe it's just the headache making me not immediately jump on the boobies, I dunno.
I HATE that Pikachu voice. More so than even Tom Kinney's abominable Spongebob laugh. I may sit down and do a drawing of a comic-con booth where, for $25.00 you can get the autograph of the Pikachu Voice Actor. And under that is a second sign that says, for $50.00 you can slap the Pikachu Voice Actor. I think it might be popular.
Okay, my update is at 100%. And it's 1:14pm. Fugger.
Whoops, silly me. I thought that that would mean that I'd be up and running, maybe have my work done by one-thirty. But no, it is taking just as long to start programs up as it did before--honestly, loading Microsoft Excel (a blank Excel document, no less) should take approximately two seconds. It may well be that I have made some damningly bad career choices.****
Sit-ups Today: 100 (absolutely last minute--it was past two)
Sit-ups In December: 1794
It snowed a great deal today, and I thought I'd put out my terribly-constructed Kotobukiya Chewbacca on the back deck to get some pictures of the snow gradually covering it.
Unfortunately, when I went out an hour later to take a second picture, this is what I saw:
Chewie had taken a tumble off the railing and lay in the snow in two pieces down below. I put him back together (the arms will not stay in their sockets, despite having been glued and re-glued), and set him up again.
Just as unfortunately, it wasn't cold enough for the snow not to melt, so I didn't get any really good pictures. Ah well.
At the end of the day, I sat down and recorded another chapter of "A Sidekick's Errand," wrote up an author's note for it, and in discovering that the brother's name in "My Friend of Misery" is Brent 95% of the time, but is called Brenton the other 5, decided to go back and replace one of the first Brents with Brenton.
Not content to just call it finished and put it out there (especially now that I have excellent cover art for it), I decided to put a callback at the very end to a setup in that same scene where I now call him Brenton, and that necessitated re-recording part of Chapter 37.
Then, noticing that the red light on my recorder was flashing whenever I read one of Brielle's lines, I discovered that I had the volume set to Auto again (something that derailed a whole chapter when I was recording "You're In Good Hands"). So, I sat down and did that section again, only much, much faster, eating up time I could've been either writing or recording another chapter.
Even so, I went right ahead and published the text version of the book, and will get on Audible soon and start the process of publishing the audio.
Words Today: 820
Words In December: 15,469
*And a handful of others who I'll have to isolate in some way--maybe I'll have them travel to Module C, which is unfinished and currently unoccupied, thus getting them out of the way for the rest of the story.
**I used to adore those microwave burritos, but somewhere over the last five years or so, I realized that I don't like the taste of them anymore, and they're often hard and not unlike eating paste in the first grade. But I keep on buying them because they're cheap, and I've eaten them for thirty-plus years.
***How about "Boss Baby: The Series?" That seems pretty well done.
****That reminds me, I watched MANK the other day, David Fincher's fun film about the writing of the CITIZEN KANE screenplay, and at one point, Herman Mankiewicz's little brother Joe tells him that he's been fired from MGM. "I've never been fired before," Joe laments, taking it hard. Unmoved, his brother says, "I've never not been fired. You get used to it."
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