I brought home no work this weekend.<\/p>\n
The past few weekends, I’ve brought something<\/i> home to work on and write.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The truth is, I’m ahead of the curve this month.<\/p>\n
On Sunday, I thought this week would be balls-to-the-walls. I was psyched, I was expecting it.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
But it was never oppressive. I was expecting the worst. The worst didn’t come.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Instead, I’m going to work on the story for City Paper<\/i>‘s short fiction contest<\/a>.<\/p>\n I think my instinct of pulling a segment of “THOD<\/a>” 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<\/i> about that.<\/p>\n And then it struck me. I know<\/i> the scene that’s right. Making it stand on its own is not<\/i> going to be easy, however.<\/p>\n Because it’s not self-contained. In the context of the novel as a whole, it’s not meant<\/i> to be self-contained.<\/p>\n Here’s an analogy.<\/p>\n Recently I acquired the remixed and remastered tracks from The Beatles Rock Band<\/i>, 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.<\/p>\n What’s interesting to me about the Beatles Rock Band<\/i> 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/i> number on it. I need to build a clean opening, and a clean ending.<\/p>\n “Dear Prudence” is a good song, by the way. I like it.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n The wheels are turning, at least in the parts of the brain that haven’t entirely turned to mush this week.<\/p>\n That’s the plan for the weekend. Write! \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 truthContinue reading “On the Weekend’s Plans”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[75],"tags":[690,4102],"class_list":["post-2516","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing","tag-thod","tag-writing","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2516","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2516"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2516\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2516"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2516"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2516"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}