It's so weird that, even though I've slowed down, I'm still writing and blogging daily, and I can look at my post from a year ago and see what it was I was working on, and go back there in my mind. I wish I were faster at putting it out there, but it's an excruciatingly slow process, and I made the mistake of recording a bunch of Christmas stories at the end of 2020, that I had no motivation for editing once January hit, so it's pretty much five weeks or so of wasted work.*
Right now, I'm recording (about one or two chapters a week--which yes, is unforgivably slow) "Meet the New Clerk," which is the Dead & Breakfast story that introduces Meeshelle Lovett (who, yes, had been in two or three stories before then, but this is how these things work), and her interactions with the other previously-established characters. I had never done a series like this before, where I finished a story and then started on a new one soon after (I'd usually write something not set in this world in between, but still, we're talking about eight or nine D&B stories written in about a year), and I'll admit I didn't really know what I was doing.
I talked about this junk last year around this time, but while writing "Meet the New Clerk," I wondered about Meeshelle's burn scars, and decided I'd like to explore how they happened, even if I never revealed that information in the stories I was currently writing. I thought about the Little Caesar's Pizza story I had wanted to write for a decade, where two best friends work at a pizza place, a new girl is hired, and they both like her so much their friendship sort of falls apart. I had never written it because, well, I didn't know how. I don't often write stories without a supernatural element or a genre "hook," and this one had stymied me because I don't know how stories about relationships work (or, if I'm being honest, how real life relationships work).
But then I thought, "What if Meeshelle is one of the employees of the pizza place? And what if this story works as her origin as well, a kind of prequel to the Dead & Breakfast tales, in which she was the desk clerk in the very first one?" And that ended up being the hook that I needed. I wrote the story, which I now call "Pizza Triangle," and I'm trying to piece it together to get in a presentable format. It was one of those stories I wrote in fits and starts at various locations, like the library, or on my laptop, and trying to sort the scenes into the order in which they should go has been frustrating, since I've discovered gaps in the narrative, and one scene that, maddening, I wrote two different ways.
Ultimately, it's not a successful story. I don't know how to write something like this, with day to day interactions between characters, that doesn't have Something Else also going on. In the "Dead & Breakfast" stories, a lot of it is about the clerks and their relationships, but there are always ghosts on the periphery to go back to when I start to flounder. With "Hatchling," which is about a relationship blossoming and then withering, at least I had the egg stuff to go back to every time I lost my way. With something like "Pizza Triangle," all I have is the relationship stuff, and the characters of Brandon and Sanford (who are analogues of Big Anklevich and me) never really come to blows and toss their friendship on the ground, the way they would in a movie--they just become awkward around each other, and then poor Sanford screws himself over (like I said, he's based on me), and then the story's over.
I didn't do a word count check on it because it's missing a section (I mentioned the other day that it copied-and-pasted in one gargantuan paragraph with no formatting, so I saved that bit--formatted and expanded--into its own file), but whatever it is, I'm sure it's way too long.
Sit-ups Today: 200
Sit-ups In March: 2629
I sat down over the last two days and played the recorded, edited audio of the two "A Lovely Singing Voice" chapters and single "Meet the New Clerk" chapter where I lost all the changes I put in the text version, because of crashes or system reboots. There was a lot of new material there, and I went ahead and updated the "ALSV" text file on Amazon. It shouldn't be surprising that I discovered a bunch of mouth sounds and two mistakes in just those three chapters that made it through the editing process, which is insufferably lengthy. Like my blog?
And, as is always the case, there were lines and moments where I thought, "Dang, this just doesn't work," where I was tempted to not only make a couple of changes in the text (which I did), but sit down and re-record parts (in "Meet the New Clerk," there are bits where Meeshelle is talking to Natalie, and it's a male narrator doing the voices of two young female characters, and it didn't occur to me that you might not be able to tell which is Nat and which is Meesh. Whoops). But I just don't have the time to do it, let alone the free space on my SD card.
Speaking of which, I never did find the other one, which has all the recordings from December and January on it. Which means that episodes of my podcast which should be hitting around now won't come out until I find it, and I have to put out newer, 2021 shows, if I want any episodes to come out at all. Sigh.
Push-ups Today: 51 (my uncle was over and I told him I couldn't do a one-armed push-up, and he said, "Sure you can, watch." He proceeded to do four of them, so I tried, and yes, I managed one, but then hit the floor and couldn't balance enough to do a second)
Push-ups In March: 2566
Words Today: 1241
Words In March: 21,080
*Otherwise, there would be more stories available to purchase or podcast, much like the stuff I recorded in January and February, which I could put out as soon as I finished recording or editing.
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