Leave Me Alone

Wednesday morning and it’s pay the bills day–which I actually keep forgetting about. Yesterday the weather took a turn; it started raining around eleven and we went into a flash flood alert/high wind advisory that is lasting until Thursday morning (!!!)–at least that was the case; I’ve not checked the weather yet this morning. It didn’t seem to rain all that hard, all things considered, at any one point but it was pretty consistent for most of the day, at any rate, and it was pouring when poor Paul got home from work last night. It doesn’t appear to be raining currently–but everything outside looks wet in the gray light prior to the sun coming up. But it seems like it’s not going to rain anytime soon, which is cool–hopefully it won’t be raining when I get off work so I can head to the gym.

I am sleeping well now that most of my stress has been lifted–it’s amazing how much deadline pressure gets to me these days, not to mention having so many things going wrong in the Lost Apartment at the same time. But since the house has been sort of put back together again, and I am not on deadline anymore, I am sleeping well; my evenings are nice and relaxing, and I can work on other things without that sense of impending doom and time running out on me.

I have to say I am having the most lovely time writing Chlorine, or rather, working on it. This is the fun part of writing a book, before the drudgery sets in and you have to do the tedious chore of taking what’s in your head and typing it into a document, editing it and fixing it and correcting it. (Actually, not true–I do like revisions and editing. It’s the deadlines involved that I dislike…but the typing out the first draft is the worst part, yes.) I do love coming up with the story and the characters and the scenes, the setting and what their homes look like and their interior lives and their pasts….I live for that shit. So, last night I was working on character bios and making adjustments (with name changes and background changes) to a first draft of the first chapter I wrote sometime (last year? two years ago?) to see if I could get the feel of the story down. It went well for a first draft–in fact, I was able to get about 2500 words (give or take) down in a little over half an hour; always a good sign. I even have the next three chapters already written in my head…of course I still need to transcribe them, but I also want to revise and rework that first chapter before I move on to the next ones.

I also really need to get back to the short stories. That deadline for submission is looming kind of large.

Paul and I watched the second part of the Ed Kemper/Coed Killer episodes on Very Scary People last night after he got home (soaking wet from the storm); Kemper was a main player in the Netflix series Mindhunter, and of course, they talked about how cooperative Kemper was after he turned himself in and how he helped the FBI develop serial killer profiling by articulating his motivations, how he felt, why he was the way he was, and etc. It’s also very weird to think of him working recording books for the blind–imagine listening to an audio book and then finding out the Coed Killer was the voice you’d been listening to–and the part that was so chilling about him in MIndhunter–how reasonable, smart, and actually helpful he seemed, was apparently the case in real life as well.

Yikes.

I also read some more of The Man with the Candy last night; the idea for the book loosely inspired by that true story is also nagging away at the core of my brain, and with the more I read about those mass murders, the more I want to write that story. I wanted to do another Scotty book this year–this isn’t a Scotty story, alas–so I may just go ahead and put off this particular story until I have the Scotty done; I’d really like to have another Scotty come out next year, and I think Twelfth Night Knavery is a good, strong story that I would really like to write, but this Corll-inspired story just won’t let me be…

Sigh. And on that note, tis off to the spice mines with me!