Fireflies - Day Four (Live-Blogging A Story)

Okay, everybody, here's some more story.  Today it was 978 words.  It's the rest of the scene that I started a few days ago.  Overall, the story has reached 4,110 words.  I think it'll be nigh on novella length when I finally finish it.  Which will be fun for everyone, because it will make this event last all the longer.  Anyway, here's the new stuff:

Photo provided by: s58y Creative Commons I added the title and border.

    “Should we call the police or something?” Simi asked, still swatting at the growing balls of light.  They had shifted so that not all of them were growing.  Some were shrinking while others grew, but they all remained insubstantial to touch.

    “What would we say?  There’s balls of light in our bedroom, send someone quick!”

    “I don’t know.  We could lie to them to get them out here, and then show it to them when they arrive or something.”

    “I think you get in trouble for doing that, don’t you?  Isn’t it worse to file a false police report than to just be ignored because you sound crazy?” Oscar said.

    “Ooh, I know.”  Simi dashed back to the nightstand, passing through dozens of glowing white globes.  She snatched her iPhone, and brought it up.  Her flash popped as she snapped a picture.  Then she frowned.  “It looks like crap,” she said, “you can’t really tell what it is.  It’s too dark.”

    “Try the video instead.  That always turns out better in low light,” Oscar suggested.

    She swiped her finger on the screen of her phone a few times, and then it beeped as the video began rolling.  She panned slowly across the room, recording the phenomenon.

    “I don’t know why, but expected it not to show up on video,” she said, “It feels so unreal, like I’m recording a bigfoot sighting or something.”

    “Is that what this is then?” Oscar asked, “Is it some kind of paranormal thing, a...a paranormal...event?”  He was sure there was a better term for it, but it wouldn’t come to him.  “Like an alien abduction or a Loch Ness Monster sighting?  It’s not just in our minds, right?  Because we’re recording it with the phone, so it’s real, right?”

    Simi pressed the stop button, and dropped the phone to her side.  “What if we wake up tomorrow and there’s nothing on the video anymore?”

    “Then I guess we’re crazy.  Or aliens or the C.I.A. is fucking with our minds.  I don’t know, Simi.  I’m not as freaked out as I was when I first saw it, but I’m still pretty freaked out.”

    "What do we do?" She asked, "I mean, we've got to do something, right?"

    "I don't know what we can do.  It's not hurting anything, there's nobody we can call, we can't make it go away ourselves...at least I don't think we can.  I assume that it will go away any minute now, like it did last time."

    Oscar's arms dropped to his side, and he stood there breathing heavy and feeling defeated.  Simi came to him, and nestled into his arms.

    "I guess we just sit here and wait it out?  Wait till it goes away, then?"

    "Okay," he said, and sank to the bed with her.  They scooted over so that their backs were against the headboard, and held each other as they regarded the fireflies warily.

    Unlike the rainbows, however, the fireflies didn't go away quickly.  They stubbornly hung around for more than an hour.

    "Will they ever go away?" Oscar wondered.  "If they don't, that will make it a lot easier to convince the scientists that they were here.  We won't really need the Ghostbusters to help us prove they were really if they never go away."

    Oscar grew tired, Simi nodded off then snapped awake more than once.

    "Help me stay awake, Oscar," She said, "I don't trust these things not to turn evil once I fall asleep."

    "How am I going to do that?" He asked.  "What, you want to play a game of Scrabble or something?"

    She sniffed, "No, I think that would have the opposite effect.  I never liked that game much."

    "I could fondle your private parts," he said, reaching a hand up her nightgown and getting a handful of breast.

    "I don't know if I could do that right now, either.  Being creeped out isn't exactly the right mood for it, you know?"  She didn't push his hand away though.  He didn't know if that was because she was distracted or that she was actually entertaining the idea.  He'd meant it as a joke, because he'd never thought she'd even consider it.  It really was an odd time for it.

    "It'd keep us awake for sure, though, wouldn't it?  I mean who can fall asleep when they're doing that?"

    She didn't say anything, but also didn't swat him away.  Nor did she meet his eyes.  Oscar had a weird feeling that this situation was actually exciting her.  Suddenly, he remembered back in college, how they used to watch a lot of horror movies, and then fucked like bunnies afterwards.  He'd never realized it at the time, but just now it occurred to him that she might be one of those girls who got aroused when she was scared.

    He left his one hand on her breast, and pushed his other hand into her panties.  In no time flat she was screaming in the throes of what was probably the biggest orgasm he could remember her having in months, maybe since before she'd gotten pregnant.

    Just as he pulled his sticky hand away, Trevon started screaming.  Her passion had awoken him.

    "Oh no," she said, pulling her panties back in place and jumping off the bed to grab the baby.

    "Hey, hey, Trevvy, it's okay," she said, pulling him from the bassinet and resting him on her still heaving bosom.

    That's when Oscar noticed that the fireflies were gone.  Had they just disappeared, or had it been somewhere in the middle of their sexual escapade.  He thought he would have noticed, but he couldn't say for sure.

    It was the first time that Oscar started to understand where these apparitions were coming from, but things got much worse before he knew for sure.

END OF DAY FOUR

I'm afraid this story is becoming too dirty.  It's not a dirty story, but I guess I have a dirty mind these days, so I keep going there.  And now I'm live-blogging this story, so I can't cut it out before anyone sees it.  Is this story too dirty?  I mean, comparatively speaking, probably not, but it's got dirtiness in it.  Am I just being too much of a worry wart?  Are any of you thinking that you'd rather not continue reading this story?

I'm sorry if I have a pretty low threshold for becoming embarrassed by my own writing.  I'm just afraid.  Ignore this.  You can respond to it later, when I have finished the story.  In medias res comments will probably derail my progress.

Fireflies - Day Three (Live-Blogging A Story)

Okay, another day, and more words.  Words, words, words.  I heard somewhere that words are wind, and nothing more.  But when you write them down, they're not even that, are they?  Anyway, I wrote 591 words on my story today.  And here they are:

Photo provided by: s58y Creative Commons I added the title and border.

    Oscar glanced up, his eyes bulged, and he gasped.  The room was filled with tiny floating sparks of light.  It looked like a swarm of fireflies had invaded the house, but of course Oscar knew that it could be no such thing.  Fireflies didn't live on this side of the Rockies.  That meant that these were something else.

    He closed his book and stood up.  He reached his hand out for one of the specks of light.  It passed right through.  He tried again to grab it, but it slipped through his fingers, literally.  He couldn't grab it.  These weren't like fireflies at all.  They were just circles of light, suspended in the air.

    He turned back to the bed, and crawled across it to where Simi lay, no longer snoring like a bear, but still dead to the world.

    "Simi," he hissed.  "Simi, wake up."  He wasn't sure why he was whispering, but he couldn't help it. The situation seemed to call for it.  It was as if he was too loud, the fireflies might suddenly see the need to turn on him and attack.  The baby was asleep too, and they didn't need to wake him up for sure.

    "Simi!" He hissed louder.

    She stirred, then gasped in a snuffly breath, and sat up.

    "Whazzamashuh," she muttered incoherently.  Then, "What's going on?"

    "Look," was all Oscar could say.

    She looked at the room, and her dark eyes grew enormous.

    "What's going on?" She asked, hissing as well.  She obviously felt the same need for quiet.  "What is that?  What are they?"

    Oscar looked back at the fireflies, and noticed that in the few moments it took to wake Simi, each one had grown larger.  They were probably twice, maybe even three times the size of the pinpricks of light they were when Oscar first saw them.

    "I don't know," he responded.  "They're lights of some sort.  Look," and he stood up again, and tried to grab one.  His hand passed through it as easily as it had before.  The size change hadn't affected their lack of solidity.  Maybe they were made of light.  Just pure light, he thought.

    Simi stood up, and tried to grab one.  Same effect.  There was nothing to them but light.  Oscar put his hand over one, and held it there.  The light didn't even generate any heat.  It was nothing but light.

    They were growing faster now, doubling in size every few seconds.  The light balls were the size of baseballs, and now softballs.

    "Oh, God, Oscar.  It's like the rainbows," Simi whimpered.

    "The rainbows?" He was nonplussed.  Then he remembered.  He gasped.  "You're right!  What could it be?  What's causing this stuff?"

    "Is it the house?" She asked.  "Is it haunted?"

    "I don't know, Simi.  I don't believe in that shit, but I don't know.  It doesn't seem bad.  I mean neither time was it bad.  It's just light.  Rainbows and pretty balls of light.  They don't burn or anything."

    Simi got off the bed, and walked out into the globes of white light.  She swung her hand at it, but it didn't affect it at all.  It simply continued floating lazily around the room.  When they reached the walls, they simply passed through, while others passed through from the other direction back into the room, keeping a relatively even number.

    "It is very pretty," she said, swatting at another one to no avail, "but what is it, Oscar?"

    "I don't know. I don't know. I don't know," was all he could say.

END OF DAY THREE

Dang it, I had hoped to get further.  I wanted to get through that whole scene, but I wasn't as diligent as I should have been, and I've still got a bit to go.  I guess there's always tomorrow.

Fireflies - Day Two (Live-Blogging A Story)

Okay, day two of writing wasn't quite as awesome as day one.  I only got 919 words in before I ran out of time.  Not even through with the next scene, just starting it really, but I ended on a kind of cool cliff hanger.  So, here it is, day two:

Photo provided by: s58y Creative Commons I added the title and border.

 

I

    The baby arrived four and a half months later, exactly on his due date.  And yes, it was a he, just as Simi had suspected.  They named him Trevon Oscar Abijeet Lopez.  Their favorite name, and then a little something from each of them.  They quickly learned that they would have to explain how his name was pronounced, because people wanted to call him Trayvon, like the hoodie wearing Floridian shooting victim.

    “No, it’s Trevon, rhymes with Devon,” Simi became accustomed to saying to nurses, pediatricians, and county records clerks.  It wasn’t difficult for her to become accustomed to doing, after all, she’d been doing it all her life with her own impossible-to-pronounce-by-white-people name.  

She loved the name ever since she’d first heard that her conductor’s grandson had been given it.  It might be due to the respect that man had earned in her eyes, but she thought it was simply because it had a nice ring to it.  And it was relatively unique still, although Oscar said they’d probably discover that it was the most popular baby name for boys this year, and Trevon would have to spend his whole life being called Trevon L.  

Simi didn’t want that.  Not for her little miracle baby.  He was special.  They’d tried for years to conceive, and then turned to fertility treatments, though still unsuccessfully.  At last, as they’d completely given up hope, Simi started vomiting up her breakfast each morning.  She’d stayed home from work thinking she had the flu at first, but as it persisted, and her period also grew later and later, she’d rushed to the store for a test, while desperately trying to subdue her excitement.  She’d been wrong so many times in the past, she didn’t want to get her hopes up and have them crushed again.

Finally, though, after all these years, her hopes were confirmed instead of crushed.  There was no miscarriage, no problems, no complications, and nine months later, Trevon arrived, a perfect squalling angel.

Motherhood suited Simi like nothing ever had in her life.  She’d worked and struggled so long and hard to become the cellist that she was, holed up in her room alone, practicing for hours while her sisters and friends played in the streets or gossiped about boys.  It had been such a struggle that only her extreme stubbornness had made it possible for her to succeed.  But motherhood?  It was easy, natural, as if she were made for it, despite what her reproductive system had tried to tell her these last twelve years.

Just being with her child gave her such great joy.  Whether feeding him; changing him; holding him; soothing him; singing to him; or, at last, playing to him on her cello--not to the fetus within her, but to him; she couldn’t wipe the smile off her face.  She was radiant with joy.

Oscar wasn’t a natural, however.  He seemed to be pretty clueless when it came to child-rearing. The baby griped each time Oscar would dress him, and understandably so, considering that half the time his arms were stuffed in the leg holes and vice-versa.  It seemed like every single time Oscar was tasked with changing Trevon, they could count on a blowout later on, when poop leaked past the edges of a twisted, incorrectly placed diaper.

It didn’t stop him, however.  No matter how many difficulties he had, Oscar couldn’t be anything but happy with his son.  Oscar found that holding Trevon in his arms at the end of a day of trading on the options floor for Goldman Sachs brought him back down to the ground, to reality.  The stress from the noise and urgency of his job would just leak out of him like a water balloon with a hole.  Soon, he could shrink back down to normal size, and feel himself again, and it was through no other method than simply holding his darling baby in his arms.

Granted, life wasn’t perfect.  The baby seemed to know exactly when to cry to ruin things for them.  Just at the right time in the movie they were watching, or just when they’d made it to the critical moment in their lovemaking.  It seemed to Oscar that they hadn’t had sex for months.  Even the slightest cry would remove all sexual desire from Simi immediately, like a popped bubble, it was gone in an instant, and couldn’t be remade.

But those were small concerns.  On the whole, Oscar and Simi had never been happier than they were with Trevon as a part of their family.

They even forgot about the day when the music room had filled with rainbows that seemed to emanate from Simi’s pregnant belly.  That is, until it happened again.

Oscar was in bed reading the newest George R. R. Martin novel that had just come out the month before.  It hadn’t been his plan to spend the evening in Westeros.  He’d had much more lascivious plans, brought on by the sight of Simi’s swollen breasts pressing into the fabric of her shirt much harder than they ever had before, but Trevon had different ideas.  Oscar spent the better part of an hour soothing him back to sleep, and returned to find Simi snoring in a loud and most unladylike manner.

He’d grumbled at the loss of his opportunity, and then, remembering the new Song of Ice and Fire book, sat down to read.  He wasn’t even finished with the first chapter, when he noticed the room growing lighter.

END OF DAY TWO

Fireflies: Day One (Live-Blogging a Story)

Okay, I did me some writing, and here's the first day's output.  1,613 words.  7,132 characters without spaces, 8,768 with (why would that stat matter to anyone at all, and why would they tell you when you're checking your word count?).  Scene one of my story.  Hope you like it, and are intrigued to read the rest.

Photo provided by: s58y Creative Commons I added the title and border.

 

Fireflies

by

B. D. Anklevich

Prologue

    Simi was playing the cello for the unborn baby.  At least that’s what she told Oscar.  When it came down to it, there was no difference to what she was doing this evening and what she did at this same time last year when she wasn’t pregnant.  Oscar didn’t subscribe to any of that new age philosophy.  He was as happy as Simi that they were finally expecting after all these years of trying and failing, but he wasn’t going to talk to her belly in hopes of establishing a relationship with the fetus.

    All the same, Simi played.  She wasn’t gung ho for the new age stuff, but she definitely believed in the power of music to improve people, be it making them smarter, more capable, or simply happier.  So, each evening, as a sort of lullaby to the baby, she went to her practice room and played.  Tonight, it was Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 in G.

    She wasn’t even through the prelude, however, when she yelped.  Oscar heard the bow clatter to the hardwood floor, and his blossoming sense of fatherhood filled him with worry for his wife and baby’s state of well-being.

    “Oscar!” Simi shouted, “Come here, quick!”

    She didn’t sound worried or in pain.  In fact she sounded excited, but his worry increased all the same.  “What is it, Simi?” he asked as he dropped Abraham Lincoln biography he was reading and dashed for the music room.

    He found her still seated on her stool, her cello resting against the wall, the bow forgotten on the floor where she had dropped it.  Her head was tilted back, her eyes unfocused as she stared at the ceiling.  Both of her hands were pressed against her belly.  It couldn’t even be called a swollen belly yet.  It was perhaps a slight bit larger than it used to be, but it was months from a time when strangers would be able to tell that she had something cooking down there.

    When she heard him enter, she glanced at him, and the smile that spread across her face could be described as nothing but glowing.  The sparkle in her eyes was the same.

    “Oscar,” she said, “He’s kicking!”

    “He?” Oscar asked.  They’d already had their 20-week ultrasound, but since this was their first and possibly only child, they’d decided to leave the baby’s gender a surprise.  Simi said it would be a boy; it was just a feeling that she had, but to her it was certain.  Oscar was a skeptic to her intuition, and insisted that she not latch on to a gender too strongly, just in case, and he always chided her about it.  She was in no mood for that presently, though.

    “Oh, you know what I mean.  Come here!”

    Oscar stepped over, and knelt beside her stool.  She took his hands and placed them on her abdomen, and then tilted her head as if she were listening for something.  A baby kicking in her uterus would make no sound of course, but it was her waiting pose.

    They sat in that position for perhaps a full minute, long enough to cause Oscar’s knees to start complaining about kneeling on the wood floor.  Neither spoke, they simply waited.

    Then suddenly, “There!  Did you feel that?” Simi asked.

    Oscar hadn’t felt a thing, and said as much.

    “Okay, hold on.  He’ll do it again.”

    “He?” Oscar chided.

    “Oh, cut it out.  You can bug me about that some other time.  This is special, don’t make me ruin the moment by smacking you.”

    They waited again, this time for more than a minute.  Simi shushed Oscar each time he grew frustrated with waiting and started to speak.  At last, another one came.

    “There!  Did you feel that?  You had to feel that.  That was a big one.”

    “I’m sorry, cariño, I can’t feel it.  The baby must still be too small for me to feel it on the outside still.”

    “Really?  You think?  It feels so big to me though.  I swear I felt it with my hand and not from the inside.” She hung her head momentarily, then brightened.  “Hold on.”

    She stood up, and pulled her dress over her head.  Oscar couldn’t help being instantly aroused at the sight of her wearing nothing but a bra, panties, and high-heeled shoes.  Simi only made it worse by sitting back down on the stool, and pulling his head between her legs to rest against her stomach.

    “This is so hot, Simi,” he said.

    “Shh,” she scolded.  “Be quiet, and wait for it.  He’ll kick you, and I bet you’ll feel it better this way.”

    “He?” Oscar said.

    “Shh!”

    “Why would I feel it better with my cheek than with my hand.”

    “I mean it, Oscar.  Be quiet,” Simi said, “If you’re not paying complete attention, you’ll probably miss it.”

    Oscar obeyed.  He couldn’t really complain about his wife shoving his face between her legs, even if she missed the place he really wanted to go.  He settled in, putting his arms around her waist, and lowering down of his complaining knees to rest on the side of his left thigh.  He stayed for a full five minutes before Simi finally broke the silence.

    “Maybe he’s gone to sleep,” she said.

    “Maybe,” Oscar said, and snuggled closer.

    After fifteen seconds, he started kissing Simi’s skin just above the line of her panties.  Oscar decided she must have given up on him feeling a kick, because she didn’t immediately reprimand him.  He settled all the way down to his butt, removed his cheek from her stomach, and looked up at her.

    “I think it’s still probably a while before I’m supposed to be able to feel a kick from the outside, Niña.  Don’t worry, I’m sure I’ll get my chance.”

    “I guess, “ she said, resigned, “but it was so cool.  You would have loved it.”

    “ I will love it.”

    “Right,” she said, standing up from the stool, grabbing her dress, and throwing it back over her head.  “He must have gone to sleep or something.”

    “Wait a minute,” Oscar protested, “What’s that about.  Take that back off.”

    She ignored him.  Her mind wasn’t as easily led to sex as Oscar’s was.  She was still revelling in the glorious event that was feeling the being growing inside her moving for the first time.

    “It was so amazing, Oscar. Wow,” Simi said, ”I bet it was the Bach that got him excited.”

    “Him?”

    “Oh my God, do you never quit?” she screamed, stomping her feet and shaking her head in frustration.

    “I guess not,” Oscar said.  He stood quickly to get out of the dangerous position he’d been in.  She’d almost jabbed his hand with one of her heels as she’d stomped her feet.

    When he rose, she stepped into him, and hugged him close.

    “Oh, Oscar.  It’s real!  It’s finally happening.  I can’t believe it.”

    “Yeah, I--”  He broke off as he noticed the light in the room changing.  The white hue of the overhead light was being replaced with a yellowish tinge, but no sooner did it go yellow than it shifted to green, then blue.

    “What is that?” asked Simi.

    They stepped away from each other, and looked around the room, which had filled with rainbow light.  Eventually, both of their gazes were drawn to Simi’s belly.  The light seemed to be originating from there, as if a prism was imbedded inside it, and a light was shining through it, spraying the colors of the rainbow out into the room.

    Simi turned, and the colors followed her as she did.

    “What’s going on Oscar?” she said, both fear and awe fighting in her voice for control.

    “I don’t know, Simi.  I don’t--” he didn’t know what to say.  Simi had a rainbow flowing out of her stomach into the music room.  He’d never seen or even heard of anything like it.  “What are you doing?” he asked, panic seeping into his question.  The rainbow light rippled through the room as if it were liquid.

    “I don’t know.  I’m not doing anything,” she said, fear winning out over awe in her own voice.  “There’s a, a rainbow coming out of me, Oscar.  A fucking rainbow!  What’s going on.”

    Simi never swore.  In fact, she gave him grief every time he ever swore in front of her as well.  Hearing her use that word took Oscar’s panic to another level.  Scenes from movies where people filled with energy and then exploded played across the screen in the theater of his mind.  What could he do to stop it?  Throw water on her?  He had no idea.

    “Um...um, does it hurt?  Are you in pain?” He asked, although he didn’t know what he’d do if she said yes.  Or if she said no, for that matter.

    “No,” she said, “but what’s going on?”  She was shrieking now.

    Oscar could only shriek back, “I don’t know.  I...I don’t know.”

    He decided he would go and get some water, and turned for the door, when suddenly the light went out.  The rainbow hues vanished, replaced again by the stark white light of the overhead lamp.

    Simi and Oscar stood in the music room, staring at each other, and panting.  Their eyes darted around the room, neither moved an inch.  They both waited for the phenomenon to return, or perhaps something worse to occur.

    After a moment of silence, Simi finally said, “What happened, Oscar?  What was that?”

    “I don’t know,” was all he could respond.  “I don’t know.  I wish I did, but I don’t.”

END OF DAY ONE

If you find any typos, let me know.  If you have other comments, aside from those of the, "You can do it, keep going," variety, please save them until I have finished the story.  I don't want anything to kill my momentum and prevent me from actually finishing the story.  Thanks.

Do I Really Want To Be A Writer?

On the eve of our live-blogging-a-story event, I'm reminded of a conversation that Rish and I had a while back.  He has been working on publishing his stories on Smashwords and Amazon, but he was a little despondent about his lack of success and wondering if it was a completely fruitless exercise.  I went on Dean Wesley Smith's blog and found his post about making a living publishing only short fiction.  Rish read it, and scoffed at the things that DWS had to say as per usual, but still some things jumped out.  Rish spoke about some particularly harsh words that Smith had for people like me:

Please don’t give me your pitiful excuses about having to research or think about your story or build character worksheets or rewrite your story a dozen times to make your story dull and boring and just like everyone else’s story. And please don’t talk to me about how your day job is 60 hours. I have heard all the excuses and am not interested in why you can’t dig out one hour a day average out of your life. If you can’t do that much, stop claiming you want to be a writer. At least to me. Thanks!

Hearing these words made me stop and think.  Do I really want to be a writer?  I keep claiming that I do, but I can't even carve out one measly hour to spend on it each day.  Is this really my dream?  Or is it  just B.S. that I spout because it sounds good on a show?

What Smith says is that if it's really something somebody means to do; not just wants to do, but means to do; then that person will do what it takes to do it.  Those that don't will never achieve it, and should cut the shit and admit it.  I think it's time to do this thing.  Tomorrow, I'll start that whole live blogging deal, but when I finish, I'm not finished.  I gotta keep writing.

I'm going to start wandering off on what might seem like a tangent, and when I finish, I guess we'll see if it really was.  On Facebook last week, I found out that Jay Lake died.  I was never a big fan of Jay Lake, sometimes his stories appealed to me other times they didn't, but I was aware of him, and I have even quoted, more than once, a thing that he said about what he had done to become a writer.

He once said on his blog (I think) that he had given up being a consumer.  He figured that every minute being a consumer was a minute not being used to be a producer.  He had decided to be a producer of fiction content instead of a consumer.  So, he didn't watch TV.  He didn't watch movies.  He used his time to work on his fiction.  I'm guessing that he did still read books, because that seems like an important part of being a producer of fiction, but beyond that, he was a producer.

Maybe he made that decision because he had cancer, and was faced with the idea that he only had a very finite number of minutes left in his life.  When it comes down to it, we all only have a finite number of minutes remaining, but most of us don't have something like a disease eating us away from the inside to continually remind us of the fact.  Most of us don't "Live like we were dying," as the old country song says, because we don't realize that we are dying, we are all dying, sooner or later.

Also, on Facebook, I saw that Eugie Foster is continuing her battle with cancer as well.  I know even less about Eugie Foster than I do about Jay Lake.  I have enjoyed her stories when I've read them or heard them on Escape Pod, Podcastle and the like.  I hope she is able to conquer her cancer, and live on long and happy.  I bet, each time she gets an idea for a story, she has a certain urge to write that can be traced back to that onus over her head.  The fact that she understands much better than most how life is finite and short.

Now, coming around for the tangent to intersect back with the main line.  I wrote a post a few weeks back about having gone to a physical, and discovering that I had a condition called pitting edema.  This is a symptom that most commonly indicates that the person who has it has some sort of heart disease going on.  It's not always heart disease.  It could be liver or kidney related too.  But it's probably not just nothing.

I saw my doctor, who prescribed me some pills and told me I should see a cardiologist.  I saw a cardiologist, who told me I needed to get a test and some lab work.  Tomorrow, I go first thing in the morning for that test and lab work.  It's been something like a month since I found out there was an issue, and I may finally be getting an idea of just what the issue is.

But, whatever the issue is, it reminds me that life is finite and short.  Who knows how many minutes, weeks, months or years I have left in my life?  I don't, and neither does anyone else.  But I do know that there's only so many of them.  When the doctor asked me if I had a history of heart disease in my family, I told him about my grandfather who died of a heart attack at 41 years of age.  Only a year and a half older than I am now.  It could be very short indeed.

I've said that writing is a cool occupation, because unlike most other occupations, it doesn't really matter when you start it.  It's not like acting, where if you don't start young, you'll not likely be anything but a character actor.  It's not like sports, where if you don't start young, your body will be unable to withstand the rigors of the job.  You could be as old as you want when you start writing.  As long as you don't have early onset Alzheimer's, then you should be fine.

But if you wait too long, you just might be dead.

Man, this has turned out to be a really morbid bit of blogging.  But I can't help it.  It's where my mind is right now.  Maybe after the test has gone through, I'll have news that will make me less prone to dwell on the worst.  Or maybe not.  We'll see.

But for now, I'm going to take this whole thing, and make it as positive as I can.  I'm going to spend a little more time with my kids and my wife each day.  I'm going to hug them a little tighter and closer.  I'm going to treasure every moment that I have with them.

And, on a different but related note, I'm going to write.

Available

Rish put a post about this up on the main Dunesteef blog, but I thought I ought to mention it here too.  I don't always not write it turns out. On occasion I do...write that is.  Proof of that is available on Amazon.com right now.

A few years ago, Rish and I got together and collaborated on a short story.  It's the only time we've done something like that (although we did collaborate on a screenplay--or radio play--called "The Spirit of Christmas" that we used as our Christmas episode one year, but that doesn't count, so don't mention it).  It was quite a difficult process, but we managed to get a finished story out of it in the end, and I think it's a pretty good one.

So, if you've got a Kindle or one of those devices like unto it that can read stories from Amazon.com, both Rish and I would think it was really cool of you if you went over, bought the story, and read it.  You could give us a review too, that would be neat as well.

The story's a really long one, too, so it should be worth your money.  Something like 11,000 words, or, according to Amazon, 52 pages.  That's a novelette, therefore.

Hope you like it.

Live Blogging A Story

This was an idea that Rish and I had a while ago, maybe as much as four months ago. "Let's both write a story, and each day, as we write it, we post it on our blogs." Except, at the time, Rish was right in the middle of a story (that he would later lose the notebook it was written on), and he wanted to finish it up first before moving on to the next one.

 "We'll do it some time soon," we said.  When he finished his story, something came up, and then something else.  Pretty soon it was a forgotten thing.

Sometime in April, we recorded an episode of That Gets My Goat, and somehow we brought this idea up while we were talking.

"Is it safe to say," Rish asked as we recorded, "That by the time this episode comes out, we'll have done this live blogging a story thing?"

"Oh, yeah," I said with my usual groundless confidence, "We'll do it soon."

That episode of TGMG was what is known as in the biz an evergreen episode, meaning that it had no event that its release needed to coincide with.  It could be released at any time.  It was always green.  I went home, pulled the file off my Zoom, and sent it to Rish, and promptly forgot that it ever existed at all.

Fast forward a few months, and Rish was looking for an easy edit, a TGMG episode that he could bust out really fast, so he could get back to the responsibilities and deadlines that were breathing down his neck.  He looked at the episode we'd recorded that night, and figured we couldn't have talked for more than 15 minutes about that particular subject, so it should do nicely.

It turned out to be a full hour of us gabbing, and it wasn't until the 58th minute that we started talking about that live blogging thing.  After spending all the time it took to edit the episode, Rish was loathe to set it aside and edit a different one.  So, now, it turns out we've gotta do this thing that we've talked about at last.  Until we do, we can't release another TGMG.

So, what does that mean?  It means you, loyal reader, are in for a treat (or a trick?).  Rish and I will, starting Monday, be writing stories live on the blog.  Each day, however many words we managed to write will get posted on the blog for anyone to read.  And we will keep going until we are done.

As per what I said on that long ago recorded episode of TGMG, I will be writing a story about family who has a child whose dreams somehow manifest in the real world, and the ramifications of such a circumstance.

The story will be called "Fireflies", and was inspired by the song with the same name by Owl City.  However, it will not be anything like an Owl City song.  It'll be more like a B.D. Anklevich story.  Rish Outfield may be the only one out there who really knows what a statement like that means, because he's the only one who has read very many of my stories.  So, most of you won't know until it comes to an end what I'm talking about, but my plans for this story are 100% classic B.D. Anklevich material.

I hope there's somebody out there who is excited to hear about this other than just Rish and I. I think, based on comments I've heard from people in the past, that there are.  I also hope that I am able to do a good job with this story, and live up to, nay exceed any expectations you might have.  Perhaps, if this works out well, maybe I'll do it again.  Hell, maybe I'll just publish everything I write this way.  Who knows?