Jun 28 2008
Work and play; reading and writing
Baby Bro came over and cleaned my gutters (he’s taller and brought a longer ladder). He also took down a few low-hanging branches which I later took to the yardwaste collection center. I didn’t know that I didn’t have to separate the leaves and branches. The attendant had a chuckle at my hard work, but at least he educated me!
BB also brought over the second Futurama movie. It wasn’t nearly as funny (or focused) as the first one. The title was a clue that it was going to be a somewhat vulgar view of love and belonging, but BB didn’t know the saying “the beast with two backs” so it flew past him. The two best lines had us literally having to press the “review” button because we missed some of the dialogue afterwards, since we were laughing too hard. My favorite line is the “scientific” explanation by Professor Farnsworth: “Electromatter is Matter’s badass grandma.” And Bender’s speech at the end, explaining why he “rescued” his friends from a universe of bliss, was the very antithesis of 1 Corinthians 13:4, thus making it funnier than it would have been.
We went to bed past midnight and I, of course, managed to wake up less than 6 hours later. A thunderstorm was moving through, which isn’t that unusual. But I heard the rainwater rushing through the now-clear gutters and woke up enough to be completely awake.
I finished reading Danny Gospel and intend to post a review of it shortly, along with parallels between it and Odd Hours, by another author.
But first I must finish some writing of my own. I think I know why I was “blocked” while writing during the school year. When I write, I become completely consumed and lose track of time. I wrote for 12.5 hours a few days ago when I wasn’t using my alarm clock to curtail my writing session. I took a few breaks here and there, but I estimate that I was writing for 6 hours straight at the end.
The worst part is that I was working on character’s backstories, most of which won’t appear in the novel. But I had half-formed ideas about who the adults were, so off I went. One of my journalism teachers used to tell me that I was a good writer but tended to write “the history of dirt” (instead of sticking to the subject of worm-farming, for example). As a result, the editors had to prune deeply because my articles ran too long for newspapers. Unfortunately, I never freelanced for magazines, because they tend to like longer stories.
But I digress.
