Nonsequitur Life

I keep trying to start posts and then I get about three lines in and…ech.

Delete.

Come back later.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

We are in the middle of a four-day weekend. Bob’s company started closing for MLK Day in recent years and he took Tuesday off to use up some time. It’s nice to have a long weekend when we’re not sick since our Christmas vacation was tainted.

Plague Update: Still coughing three weeks later. It’s getting better little by little, but it’s just annoying at this point. It’s at its worst late at night when I’m trying to fall asleep. So that’s nice. (I’m not surprised it’s hanging on simply because any illness I have typically drags out a solid two weeks at least and this one in particular, as we all know, is notorious for being a total asshole.)

Minnesota Weather Update: They said we were getting a blizzard—anywhere between 3 and 8 inches of snow, depending on when you looked at the weather report—but we got nothing. Now we’re under a multi-day windchill advisory. As I type this it is negative four with a windchill of negative twenty-four. Can’t wait to break out in hives when I have to leave the house.

Local Road Construction Update: Long overdue, but they finished for the season in early December and all of the major stuff is finally DONE. Come spring they mostly just need to finish the landscaping and other cosmetic stuff. Halle-fucking-lujah. As they finish this stuff off, they’re starting work farther down the highway to take out the next two stoplight intersections and that’s going to take another 2-3 years, but it won’t have nearly the same impact on our travels thanks to the stuff they just finished and it certainly won’t be shaking my entire house every gaddamn day.

Writing has been almost at a complete standstill the past few months so my brain is still grappling hard for other outlets to occupy my time. Which, as of late, means that this website starts getting poked at behind the scenes. I’ve been making a lot of changes to the back end in the past year and I found something else I could muck around with to fill some time. It created an annoying but mostly harmless issue, but it’s a small price to pay to eliminate some file bloat on my server and also make it easier for me to experiment with pipe dreams that crop up during these writing droughts. That second part might not necessarily be a good thing, but I didn’t break anything in the process of setting it all up, so at least there’s that.

Basil has apparently gone into winter hibernation because he’s been suspiciously quiet in recent weeks. But not before he dropped a big ol’ whatif on my desk and I have no idea what to do with it. There are about five slightly different variations of a single plot point and it’s just been rolling around in my head, driving me crazy. It’s not even a particularly good plot point so I have no clue why it’s nagging at me so much.

Basil did pop up a few nights ago before disappearing again to suggest changing a single character in a story that has been languishing for a year or more. The change wouldn’t really change much about the story itself, so it’s just another why did you even bring this up, Basil kind of useless suggestion.

If there’s a whatif I should be focusing on, it’s for Wicked White. It cropped up quite awhile ago and I have actually written a couple thousand words for it. It changes the trajectory of the story and in some ways it feels like it could be a better path, but I still really like the original and it does have its own merits. If nothing else, it could become kind of like a half-assed choose your own adventure because there is a specific point where the story has a chance to go in one direction or the other. Bob told me I should write both. As long as I have the ideas to put down on the page for this monstrosity, I will keep working on both. And the divergent path would also make it much easier to fill up the dead space in the middle of the story where not much happens in the original. I just have to figure out exactly where the path splits and it will make things much easier to proceed.

Or so I tell myself.

And someday I will come back and read this brain dump and be utterly confused as to what I was even talking about.

Par for the course.

Jinx says, Hi.

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boy The Killers