Awesome trippy artwork tonight from Dan McPharlin.
Dude! How did I not realize it was 7Eleven day??? That ubiquitous convenience store in LA that has become such a fixture of my life. Many a walk down the block for a snack or a Slurpee or a quart of milk have I taken during my time in the sprawling city.
I should be drinking a coke slurpee right now…maybe I’ll get myself one tomorrow in rememberance.
It. Was. HOT today. 105, I think…that’s pretty much as hot as it gets here. Maybe I’ve seen 107. I mean in Sherman Oaks, specifically. It’s not supposed to cool down again until next weekend. Another triple digit day tomorrow…the extended “indian summer.” It’s always been a thing in California, actually. It’s always been hottest from August to the middle or end of October. This is pretty damn hot, though. Ah…the miracles of air conditioning.
It was *going* to be a work day today, but the world conspired against me and I had to let the idea go. So, I worked on Icarus instead…and I’ve had a bit of a breakthrough, I think. Unfortunately…that breakthrough means an almost top to bottom rewrite…I mean, I’ll still get to use the majority of my existing scenes, but all of them will still require rewriting due to a major restructuring of the plot. Basically…my cold open will now become my cliffhanger…I know! Crazy! It was a note courtesy of a friend, a note I got from them like two months ago, acutally…and I didn’t see it, and I wish I had because I *think* that I love it. Structurally, it feels right.
So yeah…some real progress today on that front. I got an outline sketched, which I’ll be mulling over for the next few days probably…but I have some optimism, guys, that once this new outline comes together, the scenes are going to be pretty fucking crystal-clear and I’ll be able to churn out the next draft fairly easily…I HOPE. We shall see how it goes. I will also be outlining for the next Starstuff novel in the meantime. Oh! And outlining for an entry into the Star Trek Strange New Worlds contest…they just relaunched it, and it seems like it’d be a total waste of my enduring love of the shows NOT to write a short story for it. Plus, the max length is 10,000 words. That’s nothing. I can write that shit in a day if I had to 😛 Not that I want to. Mainly, I want to come up with a story that engages my imagination and explores some relationship that the shows never touched on. At least in the specific way my story will…WHAT that is, I have no idea. But I want to approach the exact same way I would as a spec script. Spec scripts are written for the actors and the characters on the show…you have to give them some new and interesting to do, something that what’s come before has begged to be explored, but we didn’t even realize till the spec came along needed to be done.
Anyway, I’m losing consciousness right now. I have no idea if my last sentence even makes sense, and I’m not going back and proofreading that shit. Nope. Not this daily blogger. My allergies have been a little wonky lately because of the changing seasons, and so I took Benadryl tonight. It’s kicking in. Yup.
So, a lost work day, but a found work day on the writing front. I felt discombobulated all day, I have to confess, because my rhyhtm is off right now. I’m not stressing about it now, though. Day off tomorrow like it should be, and then back to work. Normal schedule.
Oh! And happy birthday to my brother from another mother Mr. Joseph Valdez. We walked down to 1UP and had a drink with him. Love that dude.
Good night. The Benadryl calls.