Blog 6/1

I heard a song playing on the radio as I pulled in front of the library just now that went, "And if I can't be close to you, I'll settle for the ghost of you."  I thought it would make for a pretty good basis for a short story.

Of course, that was before I Googled who sang it.*

Seven or eight months back, Marshal Latham commented that he would like to hear me read Stephen King's "Gramma," a short story from (I think) 1984.  And the last time I was at the cabin, I recorded it.  Today, I had planned on returning to the cabin, and I thought it would be cool if I recorded an episode to go with it.

But it rained the whole weekend, and got down to the forties here (which meant it was in the twenties there, and/or snowing), and my brother thought the cabin road would be muddy and fairly impassable.  So, I decided not to go down, but met my cousin for lunch, went to the store, and then drove back home.  Later on, though, when the temperature rose to the mid-seventies, I thought, Well, that makes it the mid-fifties at the cabin, so surely the snow would melt and the mud would . . . what, harden?

I asked my mom if I should take my car or borrow my dad's truck, and she practically forbade me to go, returning me in a sentence or two to about thirteen years old, adding, "But of course, you can do what you want, if you won't listen to me."

So, instead of driving down there, I opened my recording files of "Gramma" from last November, and started editing them.  And the story was just so good that I wished that I'd been a grownup and gone down to the cabin anyway, so I could record an episode for it and ask the musical question, "Could I ever write a story as good as this one?"

And it made me wish that I wrote all the time, way more than I do, kind of like The Alien does, and I could just challenge myself to write a story inspired by "Gramma," in much the same way King was apparently trying to write a story inspired by the HP Lovecraft mythos when he penned "Gramma."

But instead, I came to the library, and will do what I can with the hour before it closes, working on "Balms & Sears" again, creeping lethargically toward its end.

Writing or Exercise:  Writing

*I assumed it would be BTS or the Jonas Brothers or Blackpopcicle or something, not suspecting the truth would be far darker: Justin Effing Beiber.