The Gulf has its first tropical storm of 2011, Arlene. Alas, she’s too far south to do us any good on the rainfall front.
Spent most of the evening last night on the phone (or on hold) with AT&T customer service. We discovered that our phone wasn’t ringing, and that calls were never going to voice mail. Not quite sure how long that has been going on. The last time we could remember hearing the phone ring was two days earlier. By the end of my session with customer service, not only did the phone not ring any more, but we no longer had a dial tone and couldn’t make outgoing calls. Not exactly progress. Service tech scheduled to show up tomorrow. Not a good omen for our brand spanking new U-Verse service.
When I was chauffeuring Joe Hill around at World Horror, one of the things we talked about was “to be read” lists. He had a unique approach: The Shelf of 10, he called it. A shelf containing 10 books, 10 DVDs and 10 graphic novels. The on-deck circle, so to speak. Frustrated at having certain books perpetually in the #7 spot, he came up with this rule: once a book (or DVD or graphic novel) made it to the Shelf of 10, that was its spot in the reading lineup. No jumping the queue. I don’t have that much restraint. I often get books that jump to the head of the line, and I have ones that have fallen so far back in the order as to be relegated to when I retire. Or for my next lifetime, even.
I received one of those queue-jumping books yesterday. I’m even putting aside the book I’m reading at the moment, that’s how far it goes to the head of the list.
When I turned out the light last night, I tried to get my mind working on the ending of the short story in progress. I didn’t have a resolution at all. I knew the two main characters were heading for some sort of a fracas, but I had no idea what form that would take. I’m not much of a lucid dreamer, I guess, because that was the last I thought of the story…until I woke up, about twenty minutes before the alarm was supposed to go off. (My alarm rarely goes off: I’ve programmed myself to wake up no later than 4:55 a.m., I guess.) Then, without even consciously putting my mind to work on the task, I came up with the ending. When I got up, I went straight to the computer and wrote the final 1400 words, bringing the story to a conclusion with a three-day total of 4100 words. I’m quite happy about that.
