Beautiful Handcrafted Animals

I’m pleased to report that folks have actually been harassing me for not updating this blot. Good work, team!

I have actually gotten some writing done, though not nearly as much as I might like. I have a “good” explanation for this, though, so I don’t feel nearly as badly as I probably should.

Okay.

I posted last month in my post, How Good A Movie is The Mist? that Jessy and I went to see the new Stephen King / Frank Darabont movie, The Mist (as the title of said post may imply). This turned out to be a mistake, oddly enough.

Seeing the movie made me curious to read the book again. So, I did. Reading The Mist again made me enjoy reading on the subway (I try and not read when I’m actively writing, especially in the fashion of NaNoWriMo. I tend to pick up things other authors do, tricks they pull, and that changes the book I’m writing). So I grabbed a copy of Daphne DuMaurier’s Rebecca and gave that a read.

That’s a hell of a book, it is.

Only problem is, the language and descriptions are of a completely different style from what I’m using in Animals. I set down to write one night and found myself fairly exploding with flowery prose, long descriptions of moonlit vistas, etc., etc.

It was bad. Very bad.

So I’ve put myself on a little fast, slammed on the brakes and froze the works right where they lay.

It’s been about a week since I finished Rebecca and I think I’m feeling up to it again. I even had a good idea (always a good sign) as I was walking Jack The Dog this morning.

So, I’m hoping to spend some time alone with the PowerBook tonight. I won’t likely get Galen and company to the end of the book before going away for the holidays, but they’re still right where I left them, and I will have my laptop (though I tend to not write when the scenery changes — force of habit).

Keep harassing me, though, folks. It is working, and helping. I just had to move past another author’s work and get back into my own head.

No, not stops.  No stopping.  Stopping is not-so-much.

But after the marathon 9,000 words on Friday, I needed a break.  It felt kind of funny not writing on Saturday, but I made myself stick to it.  I played some Rock Band.  A little WoW.  I took a nap.  Tried to take Jack the Dog for a walk (too windy and no hat cuz I’m stupid).

I wanted to write last night but it got late on me.

I’m intending to pick things up tonight.  We’re on Chapter Fourteen and I need to get Galen and company out to Minnesota and then back again.

Here’s a story that won’t be in the book.  I’d like to work it in (it was in a previous draft), but the way I’m doing things, I don’t think it’ll make the cut:

When I was in college, Freshman year a bunch of us drove with some buddies out to the Twin Cities for the weekend.  We had one guy’s truck.  Doug was his name and his truck was falling apart.  In that sentence, “falling apart” means “the engine caught fire every twenty minutes or so”.

Yeah.

So, we had to stop every twenty minutes or so, pull over to the side of the road, and let Doug spray the engine with one of the fire extinguishers he kept in the back.  He told us the engine was leaking oil (this seemed like a bad thing to me at the time) and that when the engine heated up, the oil would set the engine aflame.

Yes, we drove from Madison, Wisconsin, out to Mineapolis, Minnesotta like that.

It took the better part of eight hours.

It should be a 3-4 hour trip, max.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, once we got the rhythm of  stopping the truck to put out the engine down, we made him stop whenever we saw cows along the side of the highway (read: often) SO WE COULD MOO AT THEM.

I don’t remember the ride back taking as long, but it’s vaguely possible I was too hungover / too still drunk to actually remember.

I’d like to include that in — I’d intended to have Galen and Joe laughing about the story, relating it to China.  But the way I’m planning to do things now it’s just not in the cards.  So there you have it, MY version of the story which I was planning on adapting into the book (I’ve done this with a few things, including an awesome conversation my wife and I had about subway lines and the five boroughs of New York City).

Someday I’ll tell you about a friend of mine who convinced should pronounce “cow” with a long “O”.  Like it rhymed with “tow,” for instance.  Three years later, he was still doing it, and instructing others to do the same.