I brought home no work this weekend.
The past few weekends, I’ve brought something home to work on and write.
Not this weekend. Though, I suppose if an e-mail had come through this afternoon with a dozen spreadsheets, I’d have slapped those onto my flash drive and cleaned them up tomorrow or Sunday.
The truth is, I’m ahead of the curve this month.
On Sunday, I thought this week would be balls-to-the-walls. I was psyched, I was expecting it.
I was always busy writing — I wrote 3,000 words today after lunch, and I had a day earlier this week where I wrote over 8,000.
But it was never oppressive. I was expecting the worst. The worst didn’t come.
And something that I wouldn’t ordinarily have expected to have written until late this coming Monday I had written by four o’clock today.
Which is going to leave the beginning of next week a little barren, methinks. :h2g2: Oh, don’t panic, I’ll find something to fill the hours. I’ll read Vogon poetry or something.
Actually, there are things I wouldn’t do until the end of next week, or the beginning of the following week, that I can take care of on Monday. Yes, indeed.
But this leaves the weekend free. I don’t need to think about work. I don’t need to look at Word or Excel documents. At least, not ones for work.
Instead, I’m going to work on the story for City Paper‘s short fiction contest.
I think my instinct of pulling a segment of “THOD” and submitting that is the right one. Early in the week, I toyed with the idea of one particular incident that involves the death of a character, which is a formative incident in the life of one of THOD’s protagonists, but I realized there’s nothing special about that.
And then it struck me. I know the scene that’s right. Making it stand on its own is not going to be easy, however.
Because it’s not self-contained. In the context of the novel as a whole, it’s not meant to be self-contained.
Here’s an analogy.
Recently I acquired the remixed and remastered tracks from The Beatles Rock Band, separate from the game. I’ve seen some discussion that these tracks should be considered “outfakes,” because they sound different the remastered album tracks. I don’t consider the tracks from the game outfakes.
What’s interesting to me about the Beatles Rock Band tracks is that there are Beatles songs that didn’t have true beginnings or endings — because the song crossfaded into a different song, like “Dear Prudence” — that now have clean openings or closings.
That’s what this story is like. It’s “Dear Prudence.” In the structure of THOD, it flows out of “Back in the USSR” and flows into “Glass Onion,” and what I need to do is to do a Beatles Rock Band number on it. I need to build a clean opening, and a clean ending.
“Dear Prudence” is a good song, by the way. I like it.
It’s also a good title. Has absolutely no relevance to the story. In fact, I have no idea, as I sit here, what to entitle the story. THOD’s actual title would be completely inappropriate for this one piece.
The wheels are turning, at least in the parts of the brain that haven’t entirely turned to mush this week.
That’s the plan for the weekend. Write! 🙂