194 days (and I'm not counting)

I'm here!

Still plugging away at The Long Goodnight (broke 17,000 words).

I've found it particularly challenging doing research for the ridiculous concept of Goodnight. Every time I google "what if the sun went out" I find unhelpful pages talking about super novas, radiation, and everyone saying that "the sun can't just go out." The closest to interesting fact I can glean is that humanity would only have a few weeks (far shorter than the original three months I had figured (which makes me wonder which website I found the three month fact on)). I've yet to hit that turning point in the story, but it's coming soon.

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I'm currently reading The Book of Joby, which is something that everyone should go and do if they get a chance. It's a whopper of a book, and will require some serious attention in order to get through, but if the conclusion is as good as the first 2/3s than you're in for a treat. A better review of that is on the way.

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I've registered for the last of my classes at Columbia College. It's an odd sensation. Part of me is so ready to graduate that I am floundering in senioritis. The other part of me still is set in disbelief.

On that same note I've started chipping away at the application process for UW:Madison, and UMich. The process is very slow going, and I get the feeling that it is going to continue to feel daunting until one day I'm going to sit down to work on it and realize that "oh my goodness! I'm done!" Then I'm not going to know what to do with my time. Maybe I'll finish The Long Goodnight.

Larry The Mouth Of God

Every time I open my writing notebook to start something else, or to flip through the pages and see what I was thinking I always happen upon this one page that is completely blank except for a line written at the top which reads "Larry the mouth of God." I've spent months pondering over when I wrote it, or even what I was thinking. I can't remember when, but I think I figured out what I was thinking.

Today while at the Reference desk I was working with one of the full time librarians, Larry, who is a man so bizarre and hilarious that no description I give here will ever quite do him justice. He's a larger guy (from years of drinking), he has a big beard and is completely gray, and a laugh that comes easy. He could drink any two guys under the table, his main hobbies are incense making, conspiracy theories, and trying to weird me out. Over the last month he's taken it on himself to fill me with life lessons, including his 45 minute rule (involving stepping out of the house for 45 minutes in order to allow angry female to cool off). He's convinced that one day I'm going to end up as bizarre as he. He always has a slew of the most off the wall questions to bounce off me. Today's question involved a theory that the world is over populated with humans (obvious) and that the carrying capacity is really like 500,000,000 at most. So, he posed the question "If you had to pick the 5 billion to kill, who would you pick?"

Then it dawned on me while I was walking to the Red Line to come home that it was that Larry I was thinking of when that line mysteriously jumped from my brain to the page. The idea came back in full force. Here is a guy who is a couch potato. A weird solitary dude who sits at home and drinks profuse amounts of beer, and what he spouts is absolute truths, but no one believes him. Larry the mouth of god

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I broke the 15,000 word mark yesterday on "The Long Goodnight" and the story is starting to seem a little more fully realized. I'd realized I've been going backwards with most mysteries, trying to know the exact mystery and then plug a story in around it. This time I've not done any thinking and I'm letting the characters drive the story, and the responses. It's been interesting.

A Slavic diner owner (hmm another diner), named Bogdan, has become quite an interesting and bossy character, and he is immense fun to write. This is what being an author is all about. When it feels like dictation you're putting on page, and the creating is just natural.

Still catching up

Boo!

Yes, I'm still here (for the few readers who actually bother to check this thing anymore).

I'm now twelve days into "The Long Goodnight" and chugging along at a fairly decent pace. Last night I broke the 12,000 word count, and I'm dreaming of hitting the 15,000 mark tonight, and the 20,000 tomorrow. The book is written with very tight chapters, so I'm currently working on chapter 13, and all is going well.

I was really hoping to be able to do NaNoWriMo this year, but in order to work through Goodnight I'm going to have to pass it up... Oh well.

I went home last weekend because my brain was going into overload with my bedroom. It was far too packed with far too much stuff. So I rode the train home Thursday, got the car and drove back to Chicago Friday, picked up a bunch of crap I didn't need, and drove home Friday afternoon. Since then things have been on the up and up. My room appears a lot larger, and writing has been coming a lot easier.

Well, back to the drawing board for today, we'll see how much I can get done.