I Double-Dog Dare You
November 24, 1999
6:24 a.m.
Despite not posting indications of progress here, I'm moving right along with the novel rewrite. With a little luck, I'll make some serious hay this weekend, and be ready to mail it someplace. Yee-haw. So, now I get back into the flow. A few weeks ago, I mentioned that I was reviewing my plans. I had already committed myself to doing a novel in January (hi, Ann-Marie!), and I was trying to decide what to do in December. In addition, I was trying to decide which of two books I was going to write in January, and which I would push aside for later. You see where this is going, don't you? Yes, in the best Christmas Story tradition I decided to try the double-dog-dare: A book in December, and a book in January. I wasn't really committed to this until WFC, though, when in a fit of holier-than-thou passion I challenged John and Chiara and Caroline to a December Dare. Once the words were out of my mouth, fate was sealed. My only hope was that they would scoff and bow out. Help me Obi-wan, keeper of sanity, you're my only hope. "I'll do it," Chiara said in that peppy way that only Chiara has. "Yeah," John grumbled with a pained look. "I've been trying to convince myself to finish a book by the end of the year, so I'll do it, too." So much for Obi-wan. Perhaps I remember wrong, but I think Caroline sidestepped the question. Caroline, if you're out there, let me know what's up, all right? So, I'll be writing the next couple months. And I may or may not be posting much more than Dare stuff--we'll see. But I'm really looking forward to it. If I'm going to be a professional writer, I have to be able to produce, and prduce with sme level of quality. I do not expect my first draft novels to be publishable out of the box. But I do expect to be able to make them publishable with a little more work--after all, I already kinda know the stories I'm going to tell, and I think they're interesting in themselves. It's really just a matter of rolling up the sleeves and getting going.   Lisa got a George Foreman "Lean, mean, fat-reducing, grilling machine" for her birthday. If you've seen Lisa, you'll know that fat reducing is not exactly what she needs. Me, on the other hand ... Regardless, it's a pretty cool machine, and cooks stuff pretty well for an indoor grill. After it's done, it leaves a bunch of fat and whatnot behind to be cleaned up later. We had chicken in it the first night. Lisa, I should say (or shouldn't, depending -- if there are no more entriess here within the next few days, please dial 911), has this thing for chicken skins, and, I guess in chicken fat in general. We had cleaned up the kitchen, and I was in the other room when I heard this snippet of conversation. Brigid: "What are you doing?" Lisa: "Cleaning the fat off this grill." Brigid: "Oh. But it looks like you're eating it." Lisa: silence Brigid: (obviously deciding Lisa's not answering) "Where does the fat go?" Lisa: "Right to my hips." Have a good one. Many Thanks to Shannon Wendt for her award   But isn't the Christmas Story thing a triple-dog dare? Daily Persistence is © Ron Collins |
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"This is the dumbest thing I've ever done, my entire life." Tim Brown (sitting atop a mansion roof at 2:00 a.m.) I was, of course, there to hear him  Ethics for the New Millennnium |
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