It’s raining in LA. To much of the rest of this country, rain is obviously not that big of a deal…some of the southwest, perhaps, maybe it is there too…but it IS a big deal to get rain down here in LA. It seriously only happens maybe…20 days out of the year? Maybe 20. That might even be pushing it. It could be 10.
I grew up in Humboldt County where it rains every day from November through April. It rained particularly persistently during December, which means that the rain, the cold winter rain, always makes me think about Christmas. And home.
Humboldt it such a different, different world than Los Angeles. Wide open, unoccupied spaces. Silent drives between towns where sometimes at night you may not see a single other car. Trees. Fields. Mud. And lots of rain. It would flood every year once we moved to Ferndale. When we were living at Quail Valley, which was our little street near the Indianola Cut-off between Eureka and Arcata…we were in the little foothills there at the base of the Kneeland mountains and it never flooded there. But floods were a Christmas miracle every year for a long while, it would seem.
I remember the christmases in Ferndale the most, I think. We had good christmases there. We got movies, and TVs and sound systems, and books, and legos. Those were good years. My middle school and high school years were christmases in Ferndale. I remember the wind would whip that old house around so much when the rain storms would roll in. And because dad was working on the attic spaces, of course, there was no wall behind the headboard of my bed, and I would feel puffs of wind when it was really bad. That was a cold, cold room.
When my room was in the airstream trailer, it wasn’t the wind that was so loud, it was the rain itself. It was one of those old aluminum-plated travel trailers from the 50s and the 60s, and the rain would pelt that metal so loud, it would wake me up sometimes. But I didn’t mind the noises, overall. Usually, they put me to sleep. It’s one reason I enjoy the rain down here in LA so much; the sound.
I had a really, really good work day today. I finished everything I needed to, thank you baby jesus. And the piece I was working on for the Flix turned out really, really well. I’m very, very happy with it. It was fun material to begin with, and that always makes a big difference.
Writing: jesus, okay, so now that I feel like I have my feet back on the ground here, I can talk about writing. I’m 130 pages away from completing this major rewriting step, which is hand-writing in all of my rewrites (and typing out the added scenes…yes, I *added* scenes…it’s not time for cuts yet, okay?). I’m going to TRY and get some of that done tomorrow and Saturday, but to be honest, I can feel in my gut that I’ll be taking that shit with me up to Portland and I shall try and finished it there. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. That then means the last week of December shall be spent typing all that into Scrivener, and then another week or two to do line-edits to start off 2017.
That
Is
The
Plan
…wish me luck.