Yes, beyond all belief and expectation I bought a new car. It has 2 miles on it! It's a Scion XB. So ugly that it's cute. The whole concept of me buying a new car is so alien to who I am. I'm calling it the Mid-Life Crisis Mobile. Of course it's actually an inexpensive, practical and economical car, so I'm still not really pulling off the crisis thing. Ah well.
OK, so my daughter's rocking chair has been squeaking for a while. I finally got around to fixing and immediately realized that one of the things that has been blocking me was the horrible noise the chair was making. Since then I've been much more productive.
Stuff is happening fast and furious. My sister found us a cheap old RV that's in great shape. First the new car, now an RV. Be careful what you wish for. It may come true.
The nature of a story. This is something that I'm starting to understand. Something they never taught me in school. Although in reality I only had two writing classes. In one we concentrated on the outer trappings of a story. This was a good starting point. Unfortunately the second writing class I took was taught by a bitter talentless grad student who did everything he could to sabotage his student's writing. It turned me off writing for over ten years.
So anyway; I've had a few good stories lately and I've looked back at previous stories and I've noticed that change. I see why these stories are better. They are better stories. The characters have obstacles to overcome. They have desires. They have needs. The old stories I plopped characters down in situations, and stuff happened until I ran out of ideas, or in better cases something kind of big happened, and I assumed that meant the story was over.
So now I'm going back to the stories I couldn't make work to see if my new insights can unlock what was missing.
I've finally found out why stories are written from different points of view. I was working on this story written in the first person. As I read what I wrote I realized that the person telling the story, the story's main character, would never say the things he was saying. He knows all this stuff, why would he tell us. Maybe if the story was in flashback it might work, but this story depends on, for lack of a better term, nowness. So I slipped into the third person and the narrator's description of stuff worked much better.
My body is now officially middle-aged. I've been off-song that last few weeks. I thought I had some weird physical disorder, but it turns out to be somehting that half the people in the world get when they get to be my age. Boring, but kind of funny. Yes, Preparation H is involved.
I had my first actual kart race tonight. It was way fun. I finished eighth! Out of 8. But I had much fun. For details, I'll be adding a report to the racing section shortly.
There were some cancelations for the comedy competition so I got a slot. The club is really cool. The tables are well spread out. The stage is nicely decorated. The sound system is good. The neighborhood is marginal. I didn't advance in the contest but had much fun. I was a bit rusty having not been on stage for quite some time.