Sweat Home, Influenza
(Pun to the tune of “Sweet Home, Alabama”)
It’s been a rough transition to winter. I spent Halloween weekend incapacitated with a cold, and the last week of November has been spent in bed with the flu. This brings us to the fewest stories written in a month so far: just two out of a desired four. Hopefully I can get back on track in December. In service of that, I already have most of the first story written (which I was hoping to finish and release in the last week of November) as well as an outline for The Brass Nerve, Part 7. Also, the Christmas break should provide plenty of writing time.
On a positive note, I finally registered a top-level domain name for Harmless Writing! WordPress notified me that “.blog” domains are now available so, naturally, I said “that’s dumb” and registered harmlesswriting.com which was actually cheaper anyway. Having a two-dictionary-word domain is pretty nice. The wordpress url will still work, of course.
Links
Where This Guy Blows His Nose
Captain Murray
None of my story ideas were inspiring me, so for this one I just played with the TV Tropes Story Generator. Captain Murray was born out of a Not-So-Safe Harbor and a “Groundhog Day” Time Loop — not that I needed to point that out. Of course, with me at the helm (pun intended) the story dark, brooding, and surreal. That doesn’t make it any less representative of real life. *Intense face — clenched fist.*
Productivity
I, Sebastian, do ride the bus everyday. I rarely talk to raccoons.
I came up with this story when I was riding the bus and my bluetooth headphones ran out of battery. Tragic, yes, but fortunately I was able to distract myself by examining the phones around me and the people attached to them. At first I played with the idea of a creepy hacker seeing someone enter their email password and going on some kind of invasion-of-privacy adventure. That character didn’t seem very interesting, though, so I took it in weirder direction, loosely based on people I see riding the bus all of the time.
I think there are two ways to interpret the transition that happens in this story. First, that the narrator is lying (or delusional) at the beginning of the story, but describes something closer to reality at the end. Second, that everything he says is true, but the story takes place over a much longer period of time. I think I like the second more, but it’s not my place to say what’s right.
Harmless Writing 