Once again, I have failed at the Sunday Status Updates. I have run out of excuses. But my girlfriend updated my website functionality and look and feel. I have renewed energy to update because my blog page looks much better and there’s a Recent Posts sidebar on every page. Incentive! (You do what you have to do to motivate yourself.)
Highlights
- I completed the first read-through of Novel 2. I’m not saying it sucks, but I’m not saying it’s great. I haven’t yet decided what to do with it. Most likely, I’ll let it sit for a while as I noodle on it and then return to it in the long months of winter despair when I don’t have anything else to do but cry and feel sorry for myself for moving north all those years ago.
- Scapple was my friend this week. I backwards-engineered Novel 3 from my general-idea-for-an-ending to get my motor running and managed to break the 30k mark after hovering near 25k for about a year. I’m a very, very slow writer — except Novel 2, which I banged out in three months. But given the state it’s in, I’m not bragging.
- Submitted a piece of flash fiction to a few places. Got a rejection. It happens. A lot. Submitted to four more places. Ten rejections seems to be my thing with flash fiction. I still have at least 9 more rejections to go.
- Made a plan to visit the Arkansas-Oklahoma State Fair when I’m in town to visit my parents next month. Pretty damn pumped about the fried food and the livestock. I haven’t been since high school, when the hot item to buy was a roach clip for your hair that had neon-colored feathers hanging from long leather strips. SEXY. Mostly, I loved the sideshows. I was the ultimate sucker as a kid. Take my money! My favorites were The Headless Woman (she was smoking a cigarette! Without a head! Whoa.) and The Woman Who Is Addicted to DRUGS! This was during the height of Nancy Reagan’s Just Say No Campaign. Once you paid, you pulled aside a thick plastic curtain. A woman sat in a chair in the middle of a dirty cage. Her hair was a mess, and she looked like she’d smeared shit on her legs. My friends and I stood there a while, waiting to see what she’d do, and just when we thought we’d been ripped off, she started screaming and spitting at us. Then, she ran toward us, all wild eyed and haggard-nailed. We ran out of the tent screaming. Totally worth it. The 80s were the best.
Lowlights
- I turned to my right and threw out my back. This shit happens when you get older. I’m not a fan.
Image credit: “No, It’s Not Elvis”
by Jay Phagan
