Yeah, September was a shitty month -- by far the shittiest of the year unless I'm just saying that because I've already actively blocked the other bad contenders for the top spot. At any rate, the month's finally over, but its residual slimy ooze carried over to the first week of October, so here we are. I'm hoping this week will be a vast improvement from last week, but one can never tell. It certainly doesn't help that the Bay Area's experiencing a heat wave -- not normal back in the day but more and more normal now while the south is getting hammered by their share of abnormal weather patterns.
So firstly, no major updates on the writing end. It's just been a steady drumbeat of chapter after chapter being written weekend after weekend. That said, I suppose the only major update involves my projected completion date for The Perfect Rochester. Depending on how many more chapters I need to tie things up, the expected end-of-October target might very well end up getting pushed to the first weekend of November, which is still way ahead of schedule for me even if I do tweak my 2025 calendar to move everything forward to my original schedule of February - June - October releases. There'll be a month less spent on polishing this book, which might end up being the deal-breaker, but as I'm still sitting on the fence over this, I'm not stressing over final decisions.
As for the rest of my publishing calendar, nothing's budged from its spot yet, and I still have to add Camera Obscura to the list even though I've already posted about it, and the notes are growing in my writing notebook. It's too far in the future for me to settle on a plan, and as I've noted before, I can move things around and squeeze that book in the two-year calendar I currently have. It all depends on how things work out on my end (as it always does), particularly this current balancing act I'm doing with my writing and my day job.
And so far no new story ideas are popping out, which is a godsend, even though it's really because I'm too weighed down by the recent stress-filled days of the day job. I'm happy with what I currently have listed, thank you, and I'd rather buckle down and focus on them, not be distracted by new stuff.
One of the things I've been entertaining myself with lately is my constant digging up of stuff about ghosts and nostalgic childhood fun over on Youtube. It's really insane what you can find over there, particularly the more obscure series or films from days of yore (the 1970s in my case, which defined my childhood). Anyone of a certain age (Christ's ass, I'm feeling my age) will probably remember not only Scooby-Doo, but also Wacky Races, The Funky Phantom, and especially Mission: Magic! which was my favorite cartoon series. Granted, some of the series I mentioned aired in the late 1960s, but I grew up watching reruns less than a decade later.
Now this episode stayed with me the most. I don't know why, but I loved it as a kid, and I still love it now after a re-watch. The episode's message ("the grass is never greener on the other side") struck something in me then, and it still does now, but the main villain, his sidekicks, and their main "weapon" are hilarious but also -- pretty damn clever when I really think about it. And for better or for worse, I do tend to think things over to unnecessary lengths, but that might be because there's something about a detail or two in the show that I find inspiring (or something about it is inspiring a new story idea in me).
So I'm posting the full episode here for me to return to again and again. The entire series run is also on Youtube, and it lasted one season with sixteen episodes total. And after that, I'm going to dig around some more for other stuff from my childhood since that was the age when my imagination got drunk on so much creativity around me, and my parents (bless them) encouraged us kids to reach as far as we wanted.
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