Until Midnight

Listening to Sarah Smile, Hall & Oates 

Thought I'd have to cancel tomorrow's Zoom writer's workshop. Until my friend Lester RSVP'd, it looked as though our regular Sunday meeting was getting the kind of attention my tweets get. 

I have 14.2k+ followers on Twitter and my tweets get over a thousand crickets. 

Needless to say, I'll at least see Lester who writes Civil War historical fiction at the moment. Prior to that, he brought mostly urban fiction short stories, all very good, mostly a loser or crank as the protagonist. LitFic stuff, the first story I read of his also historical fiction--like the novel he's bringing to group--black lives in post-World War II rural Georgia. I love his work because it's dark and my work is dark af. 

In the moment, I'm working on the novel I thought I could finish for NaNoWriMo but only made it to 30k words. Very different than Powerball's omniscient third-person narrator, apparent setting in this world circa 1990s. This work is set a hundred years later, the planet injured badly by climate change, the technological singularity running the planet in a seemingly utopian society.

My Saturday was spent working overtime, making Christmas money, then some chores, the reward being working on Cooking With Van. First-person voice of a non-binary person raised outside the towers--where the singularity has housed 95% of the world's population--and an incredibly good chef.

My timer's running out (more on that later), here's the rough stuff I've been working on tonight:

“Whatcha readin?”
“Pearls Before Swine, Myra Sandusky. Probably read it a half-dozen times. Epic. I have five books in that pack, a couple of em are over a hundred years old that I keep wrapped in tissue and a sweater. Sometimes on the road, I find a spot that’s so pretty, so peaceful, that I’ll stop and spend my day there reading, set up my camp and settle into the beauty of the land.”
Carly made me think about why I was out on the road, in the wilderness, taking what I needed and giving to the scavengers. What my purpose was and where I fit into the ecosystem. “I never got to be very good with readin. I had to teach myself. I can do numbers like, in my head, but words and sentences? Couldn’t really get into that.”
“That’s tragic. Words, sentences, the way that certain people put them together and transport me to another world? I’d perish in this world if there were no other worlds to escape to.”
“I’d love to escape to another world, right now. Nothing but snow outside, you and me in here. Don’t get me wrong, you’re great company, Carly, but I wanna be somewhere else.”
“I gotcha. You’re good. So… kinda on topic… you gonna carry this baby to term? You’re runnin out of time to decide. I can’t do no abortion but, if we turn south and get to the rez? I know someone who can do it, a real doctor.”
At no point had abortion crossed my mind, it seemed I was destined to have a baby, bein so far on the outs that Carly was the only person I’d told my truth to since Ramon. “How far are we from the rez?”
“I reckon about two weeks, and in this snow? Probably more than that. Some rough terrain getting in there, too. It’ll be more than three weeks if we take this trail back to the road that goes into the rez.”