Writing Report March 30, 2019
Reality went through my schedule over the last month and a half like a drunken bull in a china shop with two 20-lb sledge hammers strapped to his horns.
The biggest distraction was the bathroom renovations we endured for most of February:
Wrong tub delivered
Broken toilet delivered
Water regulator blown out
Vanity delivered had apparently been speared by a forklift at some point
Since my office is located next to the guest bathroom, and since the guest bathroom was apparently the loci for these Poltergeist-level household horrors, I was unable to write at my computer during the day.
(Oh, that should be easy, you say: Just go downstairs with a pen and notebook and write by hand. Ha-ha-ha -- fnck you.)
In addition to that, there were conventions where I was a featured guest and on several panels, plus family obligations that must never be dodged.
So creative writing -- fiction / non-fiction / poetry (or at least what passes for poetry around here) -- came to a screeching halt.
I did get some work done:
During an almost two week long hiatus while the plumbing fixtures company attempted to locate their corporate posterior with their corporate hands I had two factoids that had been floating around in the back of my brain since the 1970s bump into one another and in a classic “Hey, you got peanut butter on my chocolate! / No, you got chocolate in my peanut butter!” moment I realized I had the basis of a nifty little short story.
Did I say “nifty”?
Strike that.
Nasty.
Now that my decks are getting cleared, I’m becoming more productive.
A short story I’d started just as the renovations began needs to be finished, but I need a day or two to focus on it, get back in the original mindset, and this weekend won’t be the time since I’m at WonderCon in Anaheim.
However, I did write another short story this week, a 1,750 word tale that took me 2 hours to complete the first draft.
(That sounds impressive but it isn’t; I’d had the idea several days earlier but couldn’t get enough undisturbed time to work on it so I just let it percolate in my head…and while it percolated it refined itself, and after it refined itself and I actually started writing it, it showed me a couple of surprises it had in store, so while I was typing on it for 2 hours in reality I’d been writing it 72+ hours.)
After I finished the story, I noticed a couple of things I didn’t recognize as I was writing it, namely two big debts of influence to both Flannery O’Connor for “A Good Man Is Hard To Find” and to Joel Chandler Harris for his Uncle Remus tale, “The Tar Baby”.
Well, the story is a cautionary futuristic Southern gothic, I suppose…
© Buzz Dixon
