8 April 2021

 Song mood: Eternal Flame by the Bangles. A band I wanted to see before this whole pandemic thing hit. I was checking their website for tour dates. It would have meant me going to Southern California. Northern California is way cool, but I’m not a huge fan of Southern. Anyway that song pops into my head in a way that the wedding march pops into my head.

Day two after the COVID shot. I’m still experiencing shortness of breath. Which in turn feeds my anxieties. Which is why I need to work on my breathing exercises/meditation. My joints are a bit sore and the headaches have been worse these last two days. The first day after the shot, I felt like I got hit by a bus. The joint pain was great and even worse in the arm I got the shot it.

I’m heading to Fargo tomorrow. The drive is going to kill my back and one of my knees. Which is why I carry a cane with me. I imagine that I will be a bit crippled come Sunday after I return to Omaha. 

I have written the poems for the next three days in preparation for the trip.

I had a strange dream last week. I was in a strip club and I said to myself, this going to be awesome. But in the dream, I was married to a woman with mousy brown hair. And she was really upset. She marched right at me like a heat-seeking missle. She grabbed me by the ear and took me out of the club with the firm grip she had on my ear. I then woke up and the ear she took me out with still hurt.

I have this idea of a story I want to write, or have been wanting to write for a while. It a has a protagonist, well a guy who has a lot of bad luck. There are four women and one of them is a witch. Or, there are four witches and one of them has cast a powerful love spell on him and that is why he has bad luck. So it’s kind of a magical mystery.

I’m doing a craft study with the book Writing in the Dark by Dean Wesley Smith. It’s kind of like what I do already, just a bit more extended on techniques. I won’t do everything exactly as the book, I don’t do anything writing exactly like the books I read on writing. But this book is great on setting up a process similar to what I’m already doing. I think I may go back to the hundreds of projects that I started but never quite finished, or came close to finishing. Looking for the scenes I like and then write new stories based off the scenes I picked. If I am successful in the next couple of months, well with the projects that I’m working on and one rescue project, then I may see myself writing ten novellas a year. I like my new pulp fiction methods.

The key is to be able to look past the moment. Something I have had difficulty with. Pulp fiction has given me a way to do this. I hope. Once I look past the moment, everything works out.