Today marks four hundred days in a row of writing, although the numbering is most likely off. I wish I had some spectacular blogpost for you, summing up all I have learned, or at least a huge number of words I got in today, but nope. I didn't get anything written until the very end of the night, even though I'd grabbed my laptop, threw it in the car, and headed out around five, hoping to park somewhere and write someplace where I could see the sun set.
But it was cloudy, and I got talking to Big Anklevich on the phone, and before I knew it, the sun was pretty much gone, and I started thinking about heading back and getting a run in before it got dark (and briefly, I did think about trying the rollerblades on for a few minutes, but I just don't dare, and won't even come close to my goal of ten times practicing in March). I still got my exercise in, though.
Sit-ups Today: 100
Sit-ups In March: 742
So, last night, I did sit down--though it was late, and my heart wasn't really in it--to record the first section/chapter of "Meet the New Clerk." There are a couple of lines from the ghostly antagonist, and I had intended on giving him a really deep, really big voice. But in my head, the guy is a Cletus Cassidy type (a skinny, scraggly, big-eyed white dude who isn't PHYSICALLY intimidating, but his crazy eyes tell you to back away anyway), so I gave him a scratchy, amused voice, kind of like Matt Frewer would sound if he played a serial killer (and maybe he has, I dunno).
I also had to establish Meeshelle Lovett's voice, and John Lennon's (although Meeshelle has appeared in two other stories I've recorded before). The story/novellette starts with Meeshelle speaking to the former Beatle on the phone, and to get his voice in my head, I typed "John Lennon interview" into YouTube, and the first thing to come up was one of the last (if not the last) interviews he gave on TV, with Tom Snyder on the "Tomorrow" show.
Sadly, the interview (which Snyder refers to as "not terribly entertaining or enlightening") didn't do much to affect my impression, and I was sorely tempted to watch the whole thing instead of recording anything.* But record I did, and the damn program froze over and over, despite me closing every other program running on the system, and probably doubling the amount of time it took to get that short first segment taped in.
John is by far the most beloved Beatle, and not having a lot of friends that revered them, I've mostly had to talk to myself about them and their impact (sometimes I'll jabber at my niece, who until recently, would listen raptly to my wisdom and life experience, before, at age nineteen, she has already eclipsed what I've accomplished), but it's hard to put them in perspective, since we live in a world where artists like Drake and Mariah Carey and I dunno, Mackelmore, are touted as being bigger than the Beatles.
I was very young, but I did live through Michael Jackson during the "Thriller" era, so I do have a little idea how big a deal John, Paul, George, and Ringo were. Still, as much as I like Michael Jackson (especially that song), it hasn't changed the face of popular music like the Beatles did. John seemed tired of talking about the Beatles in that interview (in which he was only thirty-five), and I can't imagine, were he alive today, that he'd even want to have the subject brought up.**
Something really interesting that John said in that interview was that people tended to leave him alone in New York. They knew he lived there, and didn't bother him, didn't pester him for autographs, didn't follow him around. I guess that's irony for you.
Push-ups Today: 66
Push-ups In March: 665 (would it have killed me to do one more push-up?)
I did the second section of "Meet the New Clerk" tonight--I never know whether to break stories into chapters or just segments with asterisks in between. If it's novel-length, sure, but on something that has just crossed over 15,000 words, I don't know what the answer is. I break the audio files up into chapters anyway, but there's something pretentious about putting chapters in a short story, or worse, doing that thing where you not only number the chapters, but name each chapter something.
Words Today: 299
Words In March: 5419
*I hadn't quite reached a thousand words for the day, which was my goal, and to my embarrassment, when I stopped recording at nearly two in the morning, I had only added 48 words to my total.
**It reminds me of how Michael Crichton would come into our video store all the time, and I was warned (more than once), "Do not bring up JURASSIC PARK with him." He seemed like a friendly guy otherwise, always willing to talk about his (other) books and movies, but I never tested him.
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