Novels, Infernal Resorts, and Cheerleaders!
Despite a long and shitty weekend where I got very little actually accomplished, I still managed to break 35,000 words. I'm ahead of the game, if not as far ahead as I had hoped.
But progress or not, there is just something liberating about writing really bad fiction. It frees you, somehow. My main character can utter lines like "Damn. I dropped my fungus," and "What are our assets again? A dead bat? Great." And it doesn't seem out of place.
In fact, he is turning out to be a sort of unholy cross between Jack Burton and Captain Mal. And, after 300 pages of the first novel, and 125 of this one, give or take a few, I think I am in love with him.
I'm still hitting the point where I want to quit - I'm tired. I want to work on something else. But I know from bitter experience, if I stop now, it'll be a break of at least a month. If I keep going, I'll hit my second wind sometime late this week, and burn through the rest of this bitch like two dozen cayenne buffalo wings through a fat man with the intestinal flu.
Only, you know, less repulsive. Though the results are liable to be just as stinky.
I'm hitting my stride, but it's a lot of goddamn work. Fortunately, I need the vacation. Writing, for me, is like an all expenses paid trip out of my head. It's like being whisked away by aliens and dumped on a strange planet with only a knife and an apple corer, and being told to survive for the month or six it takes to finish a book. Yes, part of my brain is staggering around in horror bleating "what fresh Hell is this?" But the other part is going "This Hell is GREAT! You don't get forests of impaled like this in the backyard, no sirree! And just listen to those screams of the damned! Yes, this is prime Lake-of-Fire beachfront property."
I may have mentioned this before, but I tend to work more when I'm depressed or frustrated than when I'm not. I think because only extreme emotional distress makes the mental contortions and extensive periods of ignoring What Needs To Be Done seem tame by comparison.
Pain is very motivational. I wish, though, that I had something more encouraging and less angst-ridden - written? -- to get me through.
What I really need is a cheerleading squad.
When I was in High School, my Psychology/History teacher was also the girls' volleyball coach. The gym was being renovated, so the girls for the volleyball team and the cheerleading squad had to change in the cafeteria, which was right next to the Psych classroom.
I used to hang out with Coach T. after school, nursing a shitty RC cola from the cafeteria vending machine and talking about Tycho Brahe and Skinner boxes. We would both watch the girls get changed into their uniforms. You know how girls can change clothes without ever taking anything off? Yeah. They did that like pros. I still saw lots of leotarded bottoms and naked thighs.
I wonder to this day if Coach T. knows that I was totally on to him watching them, and whether he was on to me watching them, too. This one girl I had a horrible crush on was always there, shimmying into her outfit. She had the greatest ass. I have a Catholic schoolgirl fetish solely because of her.
Christ, the old days were Hell on earth, but sometimes I really, really miss it.
Whoa. Tangent. Sorry about that.
I will now inflict my word count upon you and crawl back to the pit from whence I came. You can think about cheerleaders and volleyball chicks.
35,526 / 50,000
(71.0%)
link
But progress or not, there is just something liberating about writing really bad fiction. It frees you, somehow. My main character can utter lines like "Damn. I dropped my fungus," and "What are our assets again? A dead bat? Great." And it doesn't seem out of place.
In fact, he is turning out to be a sort of unholy cross between Jack Burton and Captain Mal. And, after 300 pages of the first novel, and 125 of this one, give or take a few, I think I am in love with him.
I'm still hitting the point where I want to quit - I'm tired. I want to work on something else. But I know from bitter experience, if I stop now, it'll be a break of at least a month. If I keep going, I'll hit my second wind sometime late this week, and burn through the rest of this bitch like two dozen cayenne buffalo wings through a fat man with the intestinal flu.
Only, you know, less repulsive. Though the results are liable to be just as stinky.
I'm hitting my stride, but it's a lot of goddamn work. Fortunately, I need the vacation. Writing, for me, is like an all expenses paid trip out of my head. It's like being whisked away by aliens and dumped on a strange planet with only a knife and an apple corer, and being told to survive for the month or six it takes to finish a book. Yes, part of my brain is staggering around in horror bleating "what fresh Hell is this?" But the other part is going "This Hell is GREAT! You don't get forests of impaled like this in the backyard, no sirree! And just listen to those screams of the damned! Yes, this is prime Lake-of-Fire beachfront property."
I may have mentioned this before, but I tend to work more when I'm depressed or frustrated than when I'm not. I think because only extreme emotional distress makes the mental contortions and extensive periods of ignoring What Needs To Be Done seem tame by comparison.
Pain is very motivational. I wish, though, that I had something more encouraging and less angst-ridden - written? -- to get me through.
What I really need is a cheerleading squad.
When I was in High School, my Psychology/History teacher was also the girls' volleyball coach. The gym was being renovated, so the girls for the volleyball team and the cheerleading squad had to change in the cafeteria, which was right next to the Psych classroom.
I used to hang out with Coach T. after school, nursing a shitty RC cola from the cafeteria vending machine and talking about Tycho Brahe and Skinner boxes. We would both watch the girls get changed into their uniforms. You know how girls can change clothes without ever taking anything off? Yeah. They did that like pros. I still saw lots of leotarded bottoms and naked thighs.
I wonder to this day if Coach T. knows that I was totally on to him watching them, and whether he was on to me watching them, too. This one girl I had a horrible crush on was always there, shimmying into her outfit. She had the greatest ass. I have a Catholic schoolgirl fetish solely because of her.
Christ, the old days were Hell on earth, but sometimes I really, really miss it.
Whoa. Tangent. Sorry about that.
I will now inflict my word count upon you and crawl back to the pit from whence I came. You can think about cheerleaders and volleyball chicks.
35,526 / 50,000
(71.0%)
link