April Sweeps - Day 77

On Tuesday, I recorded my 2005 short story "Father's Day In August," to (maybe) use as an episode in June (does that make sense?  Maybe not), and felt a little strange about it.  I don't dislike the story, don't get me wrong, but 2005 is a pretty long time ago, and I've written a lot since then.  While recording it, I remembered that it is actually the THIRD story in a semi-related trio, with the first story being "Try Your Luck" (2000) and the second one being "Round and Round" (2000).

And then, yesterday (Thursday), my buddy Gino posted a link to the Beach Boys' "God Only Knows" on Facebook, and I remembered that I quoted that song in the second story, "Round and Round," and actually played it over the audio recording I did of it in 2004.  I thought, for fun, I would sit down last night and record "Round and Round," either for the Outcast or for my next audio collection.  That one turns twenty this year, and it blows my tiny mind to contemplate that.  I wrote it while feeling nostalgic about my teenaged years and having (what seems now like) lots of friends, and when I shared it around with my new friends, one of them said it was the best thing I'd ever written.

I feel like, if someone were to mention Elvis Presley's "It's Now Or Never," I would be forced to sit down and record the audio for "Try Your Luck," which features that song.  Then I could run all three on my show, and just lie back and count the nickels as they pour in.  Gosh, and I could even get Big Anklevich to Photoshop a young woman's face onto one of his Pez dispensers for cover art.

Today was a good day.  I got some writing done (well, just a bit), I got some exercise (more than a little), I talked to Big Anklevich on the phone for three hours, I interacted with Ye Olde Muse and felt inspired to keep on truckin', and when I was on my run, I had a gross idea for a scary scene which I'm going to pause blogging to write in my Mason & Rowan story.  Oh, and I lost about ninety dollars due to an eBay screw-up with one of my listings, which still hasn't sorted itself out yet.  But I am choosing to overlook that and say that today was good anyway.  I will work harder, and make that ninety bucks back.

I went to Target today, and wore one of the masks my mom made me (she made me two, and said one should go in the wash after I use it and the other should be in the car for when I need it).  I was pretty mortified the first couple of times I wore the mask, but I'm starting to get a little bit more used to it.  And here's a weird bit of pandemic minutia, but I went into Target, looking for a couple of items, and when I couldn't find them (all sold out, apparently, since there wasn't even a spot for them anymore), I felt really guilty about going in there.  I couldn't just walk out empty-handed; that's something a frivolous person who didn't take the virus seriously would do.  So I walked around an extra fifteen minutes, buying stuff I only sort of needed (new deodorant, frozen pizzas, beef jerky, a bunch of stuffed animals of the main characters from TROLLS WORLD TOUR,* some peanuts, etc.), just so I could say I'd risked going in there not for nothing.

Next time I go somewhere, I'll take a picture wearing my mask and post it here:

Didn't say it would be a good picture.

I'm not a very social person, as anybody who knows me could attest.  But this social distancing has started to affect even me.  You know how I know?

Well, last night, I went for my nightly run, and I ran into the kid who skateboards on 1460 (the street the school is on) for the third time.  And I'll tell you, my aversion to skateboarders notwithstanding, I was filled with so much affection for him that I would've hugged him.  Or at least left him a little something in my will.**

So, I got quite a few words down today.  I started writing the scene I came up with on my run, and before I knew it, it was two am.  Since this is my tenth (or so) "Dead & Breakfast" story, it's refreshing to me to have the ghosts be scary for a change.  The idea that Mason Bradley, who talks to ghosts on the phone at least as often as I talk to Abigail Hilton, could be afraid of one is immensely appealing to me.  The scene culminated in this bit: Mason had offered to send her a photo taken there at the bed and breakfast, but he thought he'd wait and have the new day clerk take it for him in the morning.  It was too easy to imagine taking a selfie tonight, only to see something not-at-all pleasant standing in the back of the photo when he looked at it.

I don't know where this story is going, but I'm happy that I can still surprise myself.

I hope you are well and doing stuff that both surprises you and makes you happy.  Goodnight.

Words Today: 1582
Words In April: 19,836

P.S. Each day I post one of these.

Day 17. The obvious (correct) choice would be "Endless Love," but I'm going to veer left and pick "Written In The Stars" by Elton John/LeAnn Rimes.

*That was a joke.

**He can have all of my Terminator and Predator figures.  Considering I have about four of those.

February Sweeps - Day 76

I didn't record anything last night either.  Around twelve, I thought about setting up the microphone, but thought, "I'm gonna listen to a couple songs on YouTube first."  A few minutes later, I opened my eyes and realized I'd slept from 12:15 to about 12:41.  But now, well, I was lethargic, and didn't want to record, but I also didn't want to go back to sleep.

I edited a bit longer on audio (finished half of Chapter 20, will finish the other half today), and spent an hour or so putting the daily Facebook song picks on my last dozen posts.

Big Anklevich mentioned the other day that he hoped somebody gave me a donation, so he could hear my production of "Bad Trip," the story of taking my daughter to the absolute least child-friendly locale on her school field trip (hey, maybe I could call it "Far Afield Trip!").  So I 'll say it again: give me a donation, not for my sake . . . but for Big's.

Right now, I'm at the park and I can't keep my eyes open.  How do the rest of you do it?

So, I forced myself to run up and down the stairs a couple of times (to wake me up) and then I went to the car and forced myself to write a thousand words more on this supposedly-romantic, supposedly-charming Mason/Rowan story.  Today I asked the musical question "Is it immoral to become romantically involved with someone you have saved the life of?"  Mason puts it this way: "If Superman saved Lois Lane from a train derailment, and then said, 'Send me a naked selfie sometime,' would that be wrong of him?"

I'm not really asking the question here (as you know, I would date a dead body if it didn't have a problem with my singing), but it's an interesting quandary for my main character to have.  He's a nice guy, you see, nicer than me.  And then the secondary question of the night is, "Why did the ghosts go out of their way to save this girl's life?"  Do they have a connection to her?  Is she special in some way?  Will she become special in the future and they were aware of this?  Or do they just want Mason Bradley to finally get some?

I wonder if I dare end this particular story WITHOUT answering that question.  Hmmm.

And that brings us to the wonderful idea of . . . what happens if some supernatural force wanted her dead, and that force was thwarted?  Will it try again?

Words Today: 1554
Words This Month: 18,254

P.S. Each day I post one of these.

Day 16.  "Brown-Eyed Girl" by Van Morrison.  This was a hard one, though.  What determines a classic?*  And a classic favorite?  When I was little, a "classic" was something from before I was born, but by the Nineties, they were calling movies from the Nineties "modern classics" (well, TNT was, anyway).  My first thought was Ben E. King's "Stand By Me," or a song by the Beatles, but I chose the Van Morrison song because it always makes me feel good to hear it, and I guess that means
a lot, now that I'm lightspeeding toward the grave.

*A classic could be many things to many people.  To a young person, Country Taylor Swift might be Classic.  And to those in Hell, Drake's new album is already considered a classic.

Storage Unit Serenade 11

Oooh, I ought to ask Gino to make me a logo for these!

Just once, I'd like to go a whole song without making any mistakes.  But I won't be held responsible, she fell in love in the first place.

Here be the Stats:
Pre-Eighties Songs: 2
Eighties Songs: 4
Nineties Songs: 3
Aughts Songs: 0
Teens Songs: 2

April Sweeps - Day 75

This whole circle of life thing is weird.  I went to sleep pretty proud of myself for exercising, editing, and writing . . . and when I woke up the next day, I was back to zero again.

But don't worry: I'm not going to put writing off to the last minute today.  I mean, it's barely four pm, and I've already written 44 words.  I was but a learner; now I am the master.

The audiobook for "You're In Good Hands" is up to three hours and four minutes.  I suppose it'll only be around four hours when it's done.  Not sure what I think about that.

So, a week or more ago, Big Anklevich asked me to do my Optimus Prime voice for a little sketch he was doing involving his oversized action figure.  I thought it turned out quite good, and immediately thought of doing a rebuttal of it.

I don't know if you can still do what they used to call "reaction videos" on YouTube, where yours is linked to somebody else's, but I went ahead and recorded my own, then sent it to Big to put the finishing touches on.  He is so much more proficient than me when it comes to video editing that it's like comparing my nephew's typing skills to my own . . . or my own writing skills to those of the Sanderson alien.

But here's my own.  Hope somebody likes it.

In writing today, I focused on my Rowan and Mason story, and got to a point where I was tempted to write "the end," even though nothing supernatural WHATSOEVER happened.  And that gave me pause.  Since I didn't know where the story was going, was there any point in continuing it?

I never came up with an answer to that, but I did sit down and tell myself I couldn't get back up again until I'd reached a thousand words.  As a reward, I could drink some water and then go on my nightly run (yes, madness takes its toll: I now consider exercise some kind of reward . . . why am I not in a straightjacket somewhere with a nice Thorazine drip?).

Well, I did it, I forced myself to write a thousand words, and now I feel at least somewhat accomplished.

Words Today: 1002
Words This Month: 16,700

P.S. Also, I'm going to, starting today, go back and insert this song poll thing that I've been posting on Facebook every day.  Somebody posted theirs at the end of March and I've been listing one song each day since April 1st.  I figured, since I go to the trouble of posting them daily, and I'm already blogging daily, I might as well include them here.  Here's today's:

Day 15. My favorite cover is Sting's version of "Little Wing" by Jimi Hendrix. I talked about it earlier this sweeps marathon, but there's the line that goes,
"When I'm sad, she comes to me, 
With a thousand smiles, she gives to me free.  
It's okay, it's okay, she says, 
Take anything you want from me."
Wow.

Marshal and I Talk "Something Wicked This Way Comes"

Over at the Journey Into... podcast, Marshal Latham has posted another of those Outfield Excursions episodes.  In this one, we talk about the 1983 Walt Disney adaptation of Ray Bradbury's SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES.

We don't do a lot of these shows, but it's always a pleasure to get together with Marshal and talk movies.

Check it out HERE.

April Sweeps - Day 74

There was something I was going to blog about earlier today, but I can't remember what it was now.

I really tried to get some work done today, both the earning money kind and the writing and editing kind.  My guess is that I got more words written today than the last three days combined, but I also didn't record anything, and that makes a big difference.

I was in a good mood today, and I wonder how much that contributed to my writing.  Big said that I look forward to the endorphins my brain produces when I exercise and that's why I like to go running every night.  He also said that's why he eats his body weight in carrot cake whenever someone leaves it around.  He may be right.

I wrote a bit on the Mason/Rowan story.  I essentially have this girl come into his life and be interested in him from the start, but he doesn't know what to think about it, because she's obviously a damaged, complex person.  And even if she wasn't, he saved her life . . . is that why she likes him?  And can you live with that, if you and this other person hit it off, or do you always wonder if her interest in you is genuine?

Guess those are questions I must write on to find the answers to.  Of course, there haven't been any ghosts in this particular story . . . and something tells me that's got to change.

I finished up editing Chapter 19 of "You're In Good Hands," but man, is it long.*  I was tempted to split it into two chapters, but then I'd have to bump all the rest of the chapters down one for the rest of the story, which is not a hassle in the text version, but is a bit more complicated with the audiobook.  What should I do?

I got a big pimple on my neck this morning, and it's bright red now.  I always associate zits with being a teenager, but I haven't been one (or even played one) in decades now, and yet, still I have to deal with this shit?  Well, I guess it's nothing compared to what you have to deal with, is it?

Thanks for the perspective.  That's all for today.

Words Today: 1630
Words In April: 15,698
Words Total: 103,277

P.S. Each day I'm posting one of these:

Day 14. "Thinking Out Loud" by Ed Sheeran.  I remember where I was the first time I heard that song, and digging it quite a bit.  Then, of course, I lost my mind over some skirt, and pretty much every love song took on a new meaning, but this one specifically was achingly good to me (even though it has the weird line, "I'll be loving you till we're seventy." Maybe seventy is unthinkably ancient when you're twenty-three, but it sure isn't at my age).

*Turns out, I was wrong about finishing it.  I'm only at the nine minute mark in what will probably be a sixteen or seventeen minute chapter.  But it is probably the most significant chapter in the book (although that's hard to say for sure), and has a moment I think works quite well.  I wonder if I should split it or if it's more effective as a single long chapter.

April Sweeps - Day 73

This appears to be the closest I've come to not writing since this thing began.

I took my laptop with me when I went out to buy groceries (my mom gave me a list, and my sister did too), and I wore a mask when I went to Walmart, feeling very self-conscious about it.  I know, I know, one day, you'll look back on this and think, "You were embarrassed to be wearing a mask, when people were dying by the thousands?"  And I guess I'll shrug sheepishly and said, "Yeah, at first, I was.  I've never worn a mask before, and only about half the people walking around the store--including the employees--were wearing them.  But as the days stretched into weeks and the weeks became months . . . the mask became commonplace.  Seeing somebody without one on began to be like seeing a girl without a bra on, and by the fall, it became like seeing a dude with only a Speedo on . . . in church."

But I digress.  Maybe I should've taken a picture of me with the mask on, but it didn't occur to me.  The woman that rang me up at the register wore no mask or gloves, and I asked her why.  She told me that the employees are given the option of wearing one or not wearing one, but that she didn't like them, so . . . well, no mask.

Again, in the coming weeks, that may sound absurd, but this cashier was young, and I remember thinking seat belts were unnecessary and irritating at that age.  Live and learn, I guess.

Anyway, the point I was trying to make was that I took my laptop with me to get groceries, and then totally buried it with the stuff I bought at the store, and frankly, forgot that I had it.   That's not an excuse or anything, but I didn't write anything when I had the time, and then, my nephew had to write a paper for school on whether Pluto should be classified as a planet or not (it totally should), and that ate up some time as well.

I had some recording to do, once it got quiet.

So, the main villain of "You're In Good Hands" shows up in the Prologue to that book, which I recorded around the end of February/beginning of March.  Then, he's absent until the end (technically, that's not true, but he doesn't have any lines until nearly the end), which I recorded last week sometime.  But brilliant me: I didn't listen to how I did his voice in the Prologue when I recorded Chapters 20 and 21 . . . so I did it totally differently.

I guess, like when I screwed up the stepdad's name, I could have chosen to go back and re-do the lines from the Prologue (since there are fewer), but I honestly liked that character more than the way I did it the first time.  In a way, it's like the two Darrens on "Bewitched."  Whether you prefer Sargent or York, you've got to pick a Dick.

So, last night, I sat down to re-voice all his lines, but I also took the opportunity to write a new exchange between the characters, and try to strengthen the point I was talking about in this post, that the witch has enough love for the girl that it outweighs her decades of self-serving evil.  I'm glad I got to beef that up, at least a little.

It wasn't a lot of new content or information (I guess I'll have to tackle that, and the ramifications of what happens at the end of this one, in a third story, if I decide to do one*), but it ended up pushing the story from twenty-nine thousand words up to over thirty.  And since I get paid by the wo-- oh, wait, I don't get paid by the word at all.  Sigh.

I also started recording a Christmas story, but only made it about halfway through before my recorder was out of space.  I stopped for the night and meant to get some editing done so I could free up space and finish it tonight.

At one point, I realized it was getting late and it's getting insanely cold outside, so I decided to take my run then.  I started jogging in January, but I don't know that any night has been as cold as this one.  But I remember my dad saying, when I was a little kid and it was too cold to shovel the walk, that hard work would keep me warm.  So I ran, and I ended up surviving, which is nice.

Afterward, I finished up my "Many Faces of Christmas Eve" reading, and I'm really torn as to whether it's good or not.  There are a couple strong moments, but it's awfully long, and though it's pretty absurd . . . I'm not sure it gets absurd enough, you know what I mean?  Regardless, I recorded it, and adding a line or two here really only gained me a few words of writing for the day.  I could have tried harder, I'm sure, to get my writing in today . . . but then, I could try harder in everything.

Once again, fiddle-dee-dee, tomorrow is another day.

Words Today: 416
Words In April: 13,939

I'm still on track, if my goal was a thousand words a day, but if I could do another two thousand word day, I'd be a little closer to where I was last month.

P.S. Every day I'm posting one of these:

Day 13. "Don't Fear The Reaper" by Blue Oyster Cult.  It's my favorite song of the whole decade, and even with that SNL sketch trying to ruin it, I absolutely adore the song . . . especially the underlying message Blue Oyster Cult has been denying about the song ever since they released it.  We can be like they are, kids!

*Right now, I have no plans to do a follow-up, but the interesting way a third tale could begin would be deciding how much Lara hates Old Widow Holcomb, and how the old woman deals with that.  It's an interesting question: could you, if you were Lara Demming, EVER learn to trust the witch?  And does the fact that Lara is only eleven make that trust easier or harder to come by?
The only other idea I have for a follow-up is that I keep thinking of that poor kid in Lara's sixth grade class that she cast a love spell on in the first story.  I think it would be cool to have her talk to him years later, and discover he never quite got over that "first love" he had for the girl when he was eleven.  That doesn't go anywhere, but is just a(nother) reason for Lara to feel guilty, really, but I think about it sometimes.  We'll see.

NOTE: Rish from the future here.  It's April 12th, 2021, and today, I'm finally writing that scene.  I only came here because I hoped I had blogged about Lara's sister, and mentioned her name, because I've forgotten it, and in the manuscript in front of me, the sister's name is ____.

April Sweeps - Day 72

I made a wonderful discovery today.*  I started uploading my Lara and the Witch 2 chapters to Audible, and as of this month, they've changed the way they do things: now, as soon as you've uploaded a chapter, they put it through an automatic check for hiss, volume, file type, bitrate, and silence (or what have you), and it either passes or fails within a second of uploading.  Thank the Maker for this, Artoo, as it red-flags any of the files where I make boneheaded moves like not saving at 192bps and 44100hz (which, sadly, happens all the time), and I'm able to make a fix and try to upload it again.  What used to take weeks to do . . . well, I could probably fix every file and re-upload them within a couple of hours.

So, as of this moment, I have two hours and one minute of audio uploaded.  I may have to ask someone to listen through it all for me though (I found one repeated line today, just going in and raising the volume, checking for clippy moments).  I also have to sit down and re-record two sentences from the first book (a character name got changed in between the two installments, and it's easier to change the two uses of it in the first story than the fifteen to twenty uses in the sequel), and one more little bit in the second book for the same reason, but switching out the new name (Spindler) for the old one (Bunting).

Last night, I sat down and recorded a couple of short bits for the above, and then intended to do an audio version of an older story "Father's Day In August" or a 2019 story "The Many Faces of Christmas Eve."  I noticed the Christmas one was over eight thousand words long, and, feeling lazy, decided to do the older story instead.  It turned out, I noticed partway through, to be over nine thousand words long.

That was a story I wrote in 2005, as part of a trilogy of small town carnival stories that all take place on the same day.  It had been long enough (the last revision I'd made on it was in 2008) that I couldn't really remember what was going to happen, and was actually a little repulsed by one moment of very adult violence in the tale.  I recalled having the idea for it, and it taking a long time to get finished, but it's funny how the details drift away (there were a couple of moments out of my own life referenced in the story that would have identified me as the author even if I had completely forgotten the darn thing existed).  In our most recent That Gets My Goat episode, Big mentions that some of my stories included deleted scenes, and this one was one of those--where there were a couple of segments I had cut out (the piece was still way too long), including an encounter with the main character from one of the other two stories that took place at that carnival.

As overlong as the story was, it impressed me that Rish of a dozen years ago would've cut out parts of it, since I only ever expand stories nowadays (point of fact: I added almost a page to "You're In Good Hands" today, despite having already published it last week, when I discovered another one of those inconsistent names--this one in the same story).

I don't know that I'll run "Father's Day" on my podcast (because it's too long, and there's the graphic bit), but it was my intention to do so, probably around real Father's Day.  I wonder if I ought to record the other two stories (I should say re-record, because I did do both of those in audio in the early 2000s, say 2003 or so), because those are related, and my friend Ian said one of them was the best thing I'd ever written.  I could put them in an audio collection, or that'd be three episodes, if I did run them on the Outcast.  Food for thought.

So, it was particularly cold today, preventing me from going up to the canyon like I'd wanted . . . oh, eff it, I decided to go up to the canyon anyway.  A couple weeks back, when I called Big from the parking lot at the bottom of the mountain where all the windows were fogged up, he asked if I'd ever gone up a certain road near me, and I told him I hadn't.  I had intended to go where I went last week, a lonely hiking trail I was the (literal) only person on, where I took this picture:

Did I not blog about that?

I also recorded two Storage Unit Serenades without the storage units.  But I saw the sign leading to the road Big had asked me about, and took it instead.  It turned out to be about a mile before it stopped, closed off for the winter still.  But a bunch of cars were parked there, and people had gotten out and hiked up the road on foot (or on bicycles, or one crazy dude on a skateboard).

Me before hiking

I had a long-sleeved shirt on, and had a jacket I always keep in the car that I tied around my waist, and decided to go up the hill and see what could be seen.  There were very few people I encountered the whole afternoon (probably ten in all, going up or coming back), so I could set my own pace, take pictures, and even sing along to the radio without ever encroaching on somebody social distancery.
I was reminded of my buddy Rhett, who used to love to go up into the mountains by himself and take solitary hikes and tell me about it.  I could never believe that he liked to do that, being a subscriber to the belief that I would only ever exercise if something dangerous was chasing me.

Me after hiking.

But I felt a kinship to Rhett today, knowing that I was out here by myself, taking in the sights (I saw an eagle swooping down, hopefully to catch somebody's kitty cat, but I didn't see what it was going after), and . . . well, thinking about the same old thing, I guess.

Amazingly, I experienced both an icy wind and a sweaty body at the same time.  That may be typical for you, but I've always either been too cold or too hot, never both at the same time.  I hiked for a mile, then for another one, and around the third mile, I started to wonder what it's all about, Basil.  Sure, there were impressive vistas, like this one, where you can see the lake, many miles away:

But that was not even a mile into the hike.  And there was tons of nature and trees and rocks and sheer cliffs and places where snow was still on the ground, and areas where I wondered how many dead bodies it contained.  But I never got to the make-out point Big had told me about, and the road just rose up and up and up.**  Finally, I put on one last song and told myself, when this track ends, I'll turn around and head back.

At that point, still alone as far as the eye could see, I sat down, took a drink, and considered doing a song there on the side of the mountain.  But instead, I just took this picture:

sang "The Heart of the Matter" without recording it, and then started on my way downhill.

And this was kind of amazing.  For more than two miles, I just ran, letting gravity carry me.  It was absolutely effortless, so much so that I tried singing "Is She Really Going Out With Him" to the beat of my footfalls, and was never really winded.  The steep angle made it so easy, but it wasn't steep enough that I ever feared I'd go out of control or slip and break my tailbone and roll the rest of the way down the hill.

It had taken me approximately ninety minutes to get to the top of the incline, but I was down and back to the parking lot in fifteen to twenty minutes.***  I thought Rhett would have been proud of me, but man, my legs complained about it when I finally reached my car, sweat running down my brow and neck.  Plus, I smelled like those dudes in the locker room in high school who had to lose two pounds in twelve hours in preparation for a wrestling match.

I have been sitting here, editing audio and sitting for fifteen minutes and my feet are still throbbing.  It's actually (there you go) an unusual feeling.  I guess they took such a (literal) pounding that they've swollen in my shoes and need to be soaked or something.

I didn't get much writing done on my Christmas story (or anything else) today, but I'll explain what I did do in tomorrow's post, since it's past two now, and I need to get some rest.  Sorry.

Words Today: 580
Words In April: 13,523

P.S. Every day I'm posting one of these:

Day 12. "The Power of Love" by Huey Lewis and the News.  No reason, I just remember that summer.

*Actually (yes, every post), Abibby Hilton mentioned this to me in a text a couple of weeks ago, but I quite frankly had no idea what she was talking about.  Our last master was Captain Antilles, but with what we've been thr--  Oh, so yes, she was aware of this (great) improvement of their program before I was, and that means that I can upload "The Calling 2" again, maybe this weekend, without being quite as frustrated as I was a week ago.

**Seriously, it was so steep that, at one point, I heard a high-pitched whizzing sound, and coulnd't figure out what it was.  Turned out it was the guy on the skateboard, hauling arse down the mountain so fast (maybe forty, possibly even fifty miles an hour) that if he crashed, he would break both his legs or his neck (but not both).

***At one point, I passed a dude--who looked like he'd picked today to try every drug he'd always been afraid to use at the same time--who had taken off his shoes and was walking down the trail in his socks.  I don't know why I mentioned that, it was just weird.  About a half hour after I typed this, I gave up trying to edit and drove back down the canyon.  A couple of miles down, I passed this guy, now on the side of the road . . . STILL CARRYING HIS SHOES.
I'll let you decide if I'm a bastage for not stopping and offering him a ride.

My Voice on DarkVein Manor

Emerian Rich put together her full season of DarkVein Manor in which I lent my voice (I play Ives), all edited together.  Neat.

Check it out HERE.

April Sweeps - Day 71

Every once in a while, I'll watch a live performance on YouTube of a song I dig, and very often, I hate it, because the audience screams the whole time and ruins the ambiance or mood.  But sometimes, the audience reaction actually enhances the song, and their emotion somehow elevates the performance, you know?  I saw one today where the crowd is filled with teenaged girls, and instead of the usual screeching (like at a One Direction or BTS show), there were several of them shaking and crying in silence.  And that really affected me.

I guess I've been there, once or twice, where I've been in a room witnessing something and I was just floored by the fact that I was there, seeing it.*  A recent example was when we were in Oceanside, California last summer for a few days.  My family was there, and we drove past the old theater on the main drag through town, and I did a double-take.  "Sweeney Todd" was playing there that week.  Well, I stopped the car and went to the box office to find out when the performances were, but it was closed, and I started to trudge back to the car.  But a lady came out of the theater and asked me what I wanted.

She told me the performances were that Friday and Saturday, and I was disappointed, because my family was heading back on Friday morning.  And the lady told me, "Well, there's an Industry Night performance on Thursday, if you want to go to that."  I didn't know what that meant, and I'll pretend you don't either and explain that an industry night show is just for other performers or family members who can't get out to the regular show, or for press to see so they'll have a review ready before the actual shows start, and it works as a sort of dressed rehearsal for the cast and crew before the paid shows start.

Anyway, she invited me to the Thursday show, and I immediately called my niece and asked if she wanted to go to it.  She was enthusiastic, though not as much as I was.  We've gone to our fair share of plays together since she was twelve or so, but "Sweeney Todd" is our Grail, and this would be the third time.  The first time we went, it was a Halloween performance where the cast stood in front of microphones and sang and delivered their lines with the book open in front of them (it was still totally cool).  The second time we went, it was a high school performance, and not as well-memorized as it could've been (plus, they censored some of the dialogue and songs so it would be more churchgoer-friendly, which I suppose I can understand, if not appreciate).

I expected this one to be roughly on par with those, which was fine, since we're pretty easy to please (I'm that way with pizza and underage prostitutes too).  But when we went, on Thursday, and found out there was almost nobody there (like, say, twenty people, including us), I thought, "Uh oh."  And I couldn't have been more surprised.  The performance was flawless, with high production values, good sound, and great English accents.  About ten minutes into it, I began to get this surreal feeling of, "I cannot believe I am witnessing this."  We were right there on the center of the second row, surrounded by mostly empty seats.  Because it was a preview, they didn't charge us to go in, but said they'd take donations.

But the show was amazing, and I was in awe, delighted and moved.  I felt supremely-lucky: there were so few people there, yet the actors were giving it their all.  During the intermission, Cathexis and I both had the same idea: "We should donate MORE."  It was everything the theater should be, except that we weren't wearing tuxedos and ballgowns.  And afterward, I was truly grateful that I had gotten to see it, in person, and under those circumstances.  Maybe that's the purpose of life, to rack up as many of those experiences as possible.

Heck, I've no idea what the purpose of life is.

All I know is, as of today, I've crossed 100,000 words written since February 1st.  That's an accomplishment, even if Brandon Sanderson writes that much in between bowel movements.

It's supposed to be cold tomorrow, so I'm going to put this down and go up the canyon.  I didn't do it last week (but the last three weeks I did), so, why not?

Well, I didn't make it.  I went to the storage unit (sold a dinosaur and couldn't find it anywhere else) and then had to figure out what song to sing, and while deciding (an Oldie this time, 1966), Big Anklevich called, and I sat and talked to him there for an hour, and by the time we hung up, it had started to rain . . . so he'd done me a favor, really, since I might have been up on a hiking trail by myself when the rain began to come down, with no coat, and very little body hair.

So instead, I'm here in the car again at the park, and when the rain lets up, I'll do the stairs.  I see a jogger right now, and he isn't plussed at all by the rain.  In fact, his legs look like something drawn in a comic book with superhero proportions.  He did stop running at the stairs, though, and slowly walk up them, making me wonder why he wouldn't launch himself up them like I would if I had zero body fat and blond hair.  Hmm.

I too went out there and did the stairs and ran around in the rain.  Then I sat in the car, edited a chapter of YIGH, and wrote a bit on my Christmas story (it used to be the Christmas ornament story, but the darn thing has been forgotten once its effect has been felt.  I'll try to come back to it in the end in some way, though probably not in the horrible Anklevichian way I originally considered).  Tonally, this is going to be a hard one, because it's, at its core, a pretty nasty story, like the one I wrote about the Jewish guy in the mall who was assaulted by elves for not being a celebrator.  But at the same time, it's a holiday story, and supposed to be about the true meaning of Christmas . . . and that's hard.

You see, that means something different to everyone.  To a super-devout Catholic, it's one thing, to the program director of Hallmark Channel it's something else, to the parent of a bunch of young children it's one thing, to an older woman whose kids have all moved away and gotten their own life, it's something different.  And to a lonely, middle-aged dreamer and Horror writer?

Well, I guess that's all that matters.

Words Today: 1297
Words In April: 12,943
Words Total: 100,522

P.S. Every day I'm posting one of these:

Day 11. Gotta be "Every Breath You Take" by the Police. I've already told you the math (1,924 times, by my count).  Still not sick of it yet.  Maybe I'll do it as my twentieth or fiftieth Storage Unit Serenade.  If we live that long.

*I guess it's happened a time or two with a girl, where I was happy to just be in the same room as the person I liked most in the world, but this isn't quite that same thing.

April Sweeps - Day 70

Somebody emailed me yesterday to ask if my email address belonged with my (full) name.  I immediately knew it was going to be trouble, so I waited a day before answering.  When I did, they told me they were one of my eBay customers, and that I'd mailed them an empty package.  They included photos of said empty package.  Sigh.

This isn't the first time this has happened, and really, I have no recourse whatsoever.  There's no way to prove that I actually mailed something in the package (except for the posted weight, I suppose, but even that could be a lie or a mistake), just as there's no way the customer can prove my shipment arrived that way and that they didn't take the contents and then fabricate the story . . . except that eBay always sides with the buyer.  I guess this is just one of those dreaded "price of doing business" things.  Still, it makes me a bit sad, and I guess I can just be grateful that it wasn't something really valuable (that, of course, has also happened).

I think it's the fact that this was a low-cost item that makes me believe they aren't trying to rip me off . . . but having said that, there's no way not to resent some asshat saying, "You sent me an empty package."*

No, I didn't.  Come on.  You're saying I paid to ship this guy an empty package, so he'll, what, get his money back a week later than he would have?  Actually, that's a pretty good scam--much more profitable than the way I did it, since I wouldn't have lost the items that I mailed him.  Sigh.

In other news, I went to the park today and forced myself to finish my pizza place story.  It's probably awful (which means I'll probably never put it out there), but I worked it through to the end.  I only got a modicum of satisfaction for this one, despite having wanted to write the story for a decade.

The weird thing about this March Madness is that I'm just going to have to do it again tomorrow.  I guess I'm reminded of the "Crepes of Wrath" episode of The Simpsons (which I think about more than any other human being, I'm sure), when the vineyard guy shows Bart how easy it is to pick a grape and put it in a bucket, then says, "Now do it a million times!"

But it sounds like I'm bitching, doesn't it?  Whatever you do for a job, chances are it's super repetitive and probably monotonous, and saying this, I remember this job I had doing data entry back in Los Angeles.  It was the same stuff, entering orders that the salespeople had written down on paper into the computer, and how there would come more and more until the last of the salesmen (who had the West Coast and Hawaii accounts) would go home.  We processed them until they were done, then we could also take off.

But there was something I enjoyed about it, seeing the stack get smaller and smaller, and I and my team lead processed the most orders every single day, until it turned out everybody but him and me were laid off when it was decided that salespeople could enter in their own orders and save the company money.  I miss that job, of course, as you always do when it's gone.

And I'll miss this daily writing thing when it's gone too, just like I'll miss finding something to blog about each day.

And I suspect I'm the only one.

Words Today: 2308
Words in April: 11,646

P.S. Each day I'm posting one of these.

Day 10. "Fast Car" by Tracy Chapman.  I've talked about this before, and how I just didn't get the song when I was a kid.  But one day, as an adult,  it came on the radio, and it struck me like a slap just how innately hopeless the song was, how the protagonist dreams of a better life, but is trapped in a endless circle.  The bit where she says,
"I remember when we were driving,
Driving in your car;
Speedin' so fast felt like I was drunk;
City lights laid out before me
And your arms felt nice wrapped round my shoulder,
And I had a feeling that I belonged
I had a feeling I could be someone."
That moves me to this day.  She's also got a song called "Baby, Can I Hold You Tonight?" which also breaks my heart, but in a less hopeless for the singer and more for Rish the listener, sort of way.

*These things happen from time to time.  I understand that.  You understand that.  If the buyer had just said, "The package was torn open and the contents were not in there.  Guess they were lost in shipping," I wouldn't be typing any of this.  It's only the way he worded it that made me want to block him from ever bidding on any of my stuff again (the literal only recourse we have as sellers on The 'bay, as I've told you before).  However, just as this shite happens when I mail stuff, I've also had packages come back to me because the buyer gave the wrong address, or moved away, or went to jail for kicking a men's room attendant to death at a bus depot . . . and they never issue a dispute about it.