Write On!

Okay, I need to beg off one more day, everybody.

I went to bed after finishing last night's blog. Read some more of a very challenging 1940s German science fiction novel my dad had recommended decades ago (Spartacus, fourteen cents says you know the author, but not the work. Want to bet? See my "Bedside Bookshelf" tab, once I finally update it. Click on it, Sparks, and you've lost the bet. Heh-heh.), switched off the light...

And the heated dialog the kids were foolishly eavesdropping on when I'd quit my story before blogging... started writing itself in my head. Two senior citizens fuming, three forty-somethings alternately soothing and provoking more fulmination. And the kids just outside the window, crouching out of sight, were in 'way over their heads.

I hate making children cry, even if they're my own fictional creation.

I got up, hit the light again, switched the computer back on, and turned my keyboard over to the poor sobbing kids. They wrote themselves back out of that terribly uncomfortable situation, then they walked off, still sniffling, to a... cemetery.

Much better. And I shut down and went to sleep; by that time, I could hear birds chirping outside.

Today before lunch I returned to the fictitious cemetery, gave those kids my keyboard again, and watched. Younger kid (boy) turned himself into a zebra (totally unanticipated by me... and it resolved a bunch of things building up), which cheered his cousin (girl) back up. Back home. There the old-woman relative woke up, apologized sincerely, and proceeded to nearly break three of the boy's ribs. Five to ten hours' keying and tweaking, polishing. Done; finished. End Chapter One.

That really is a summary of what went on... and it was nothing like that. It's an absolute hoot, funny, even while not written as humor or sitcom per se. Twenty-six pages in this same font – twenty of these pages just since yesterday morning. This big first part of the whole story (and a much later part that Sparky kindly reviewed for me) is straight fiction. I've plotted out the time-travel middle, of course, and just need to tighten the nuts and bolts on the mechanism, then push the big green button.

So I'm putting the story away again for now, unless I decide to retrieve both turtle and sombrero (which got left behind somewhere), and will return to defending the Church tomorrow. Besides great fun writing this (and, uh, neglecting a load of housework), it's been quite the refreshment.

John Wojnowski, look out. See you tomorrow.