Yes, yes, I made my words, but want to know what I’m really fired up about? The fact that elephants can swim sometimes up to 48km across the ocean! I’m actually blown away by this little fact, and it fills me with a lot of joy to think about these large, dusty animals (which, really, I do picture as being perpetually thirsty) swimming free.

Love it. Thanks to Ricky Gervais’s stand-up routine Out of England for the heads-up on that one.

In other news, I also love streaming MLB.tv through my PS3, which has allowed me to watch a whole bunch of Red Sox baseball over the last few days. It feels right, you know? Watching the Red Sox and writing my horror novel. Stephen King would be so proud of me.

Tomorrow comes early.

Well, I’m not entirely sure that having the ability to watch all the Red Sox games I want to helps my writing, but I was able to get another scene onto the page. It has the semblance of a dramatic form, too, but I don’t know … might be time to re-read and see how the whole thing feels. Sometimes, it can be hard to draw the emotional arcs of my characters day-to-day, especially if I’ve left them for a a couple scenes or so.

But hey–it’s all progress. All my main characters have now been briefed on the main thrust of the plot, which is just great. But I’m sneaky in that I’ve structured the story a bit bizarrely. Correct for the story, but you won’t maybe understand that entirely until you get to the end.

Or something. Blah, blah, blah.

It’s time to go watch Nightmare on Elm Street with the roommates. I’m done with the writing life for today.

… annnnnnnd, still alive!

Know what the great thing about a 500-word-a-day quota is? I’ll tell you: It’s that if you miss a day, it is remarkably easy to make up the deficit.

(Of course, if you miss a whole series of days, that’s a different story; I’m still averaging only around 220-words-a-day since I started this venture.)

Soooooo … Yes. I missed yesterday to write a silly fucking post about video games as art, because that’s more important than Daukherville, clearly.

I was trying to get Roger Ebert to re-tweet my shit in order to increase exposure to this blog. I admit it. Well … that’ll learn me. Today, I was back at the keys, pounding out the novel again. Verdict: It was far more rewarding.

No one–fucking no one–was interested in yesterday’s piece.

*Sigh*

On a positive note … Make an iTunes ‘genius’ playlist from Nirvana’s “About a Girl.” I did, and it’s playing right now, and it’s an amazing playlist.

Do I feel awesome for having a day full of work, presentations, Spanish class, grocery shopping, roommate hanging out, and STILL finding a way to make today’s quota while picking up the slack for yesterday?

Hells yeah. I feel awesome.

Today, I go to bed an accomplished man.

… And Redlaw just got a shout-out!

That’s right, I’m not even going to bother changing its name, even if I admit to dressing it up ever-so-slightly.

But the family hunting cabin is going to be featured as a secret stronghold for my good guys. And do I feel ashamed that I’m ripping off real life and a real place name?

Hell no. Redlaw is awesome. Always has been, always will be. I already used it once in “The Field,” why not use it in my magnum opus?

In other news, I fought the Tuesday night trivia shuffle and got not only my night words in (and then some!), but also my Ten-Minute Write, as well as this little post.

I hope I can keep this up. I hope it’s not too much for me. I hope it’s what it feels like: that I’m just energized, in the zone, and doing everything right.

That old familiar feeling of ‘just one more sentence…’ is starting to creep back … Like I can’t pull my head back out of that world….

Early morning dispatch, since I was too tired to post last night when I finished, but yes–I made my words.

If I hadn’t had this blog (which no one is really watching yet, but still, it feels like an honest place) or a daily quota, I think I would have frozen where I was in the story. I like to try to park downhill at the end of the day, so beginning the process the next day will be easier. Well, I stopped in the middle of something, but it was in the middle of garbage. Total phoniness, and it was a downer to come back to that.

Let me see if I can explain a little more without talking too directly about the plot.

There’s this habit of all writers I think to get characters in a jam to ramp up the tension without having any idea how to get them out of it. Then, because you do, as a writer, have absolute control, you sort of … I dunno … fudge your way through it. Maybe you don’t directly introduce a deus ex machina (although I almost did before I slapped my own knuckles), but you do start piling on the little lucky breaks for your character.

All I can say is: bleck. It’s a hideous habit, but at least now I can eventually go back and rewrite some of it to layer in reasons why my character would be able to escape at such a time. I’ll think of something, and I’ll work backward, because it was ugly.

This is what I mean when I say the reality of a story is slipping. I mean I’m doing things that I feel at the time are cheating.

Also, it was fisticuffs time in my story. Yes, that’s right. I had cops, guns, henchmen (and holy hell did they suffer from Henchmen Syndrome, where they were the ones who were there to screw the whole thing up; the only thing henchman seem good at is taking the fall (for the hero winning the fight, that is) and allowing the bad guy to retain some semblance of competence), and fisticuffs in my horror novel! Poor fucking form indeed, but you have to trust me … This is how the story must be. For better or worse, this is the novel I’m writing, and if I didn’t have all this stuff, it would be even more fake.

But I fought through all that stuff and went on to write two very emotional scenes that I hadn’t even really been expecting to be so effective. After so much bland plot and action nonsense, there is was:

Real fucking story at the end of the day.

And I wouldn’t have gotten there without the push of a daily quota. Probably would have languished in the bad feelings of the bullshit plot for another month or two, because I’d broken the story and didn’t know how to pick up the thread of it again.

Glad I forced myself to face the page. Most important thing is to just keep writing. Bad day, good day … Keep writing.