Greg's Blurty

The Next One I'm Not Going To Write
Author's Note:

This is just another mundane day in my life. With part of another mundane day tacked on at the end. I started writing this one on the 15th and finished it today (Thursday July 17, 2008) after the FDA announced that it's safe to eat tomatoes again. Is that a coincidence or not?

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I just finished yet another completely dull, average, pointless day. Well, I shouldn't say dull because only the first 9/10's of it was dull. That was the eight hours I spent at my regular job, selling greeting cards. I really should quit it because there's no money in it but it is steady.

The real money is in not writing novels and the movie and TV deals that come from them---Drusilla, my agent, pays me $10/hour (Even that's nothing compared to the movies. I get $100 for every film I don't direct AND whenever one of my films makes $85 million or more, I get $250) when I'm not writing, and people call me a crazy conspiracy theorist for this but I'm still looking into the possibility that I could paid even more because the millions that Dru says are going to shipping and handling aren't really going to shipping and handling---but I have too many bouts of writers block.

Like right now, for instance, it's been four or five days since I haven't written a novel and that's no good because I have lots of big important grown up responsibilities. I have comic books, candy bars, baseball cards and lap dances to buy. So I have no choice. I have to go out and sell greeting cards every day. And it keeps me going but barely because $330/week doesn't go as far as it used to. So I have to do something about this writers block.

So, today, I attacked it by taking what you might call a long drive in my time machine or was it a short drive? I don't know how you count that...I still don't know myself and I've been time traveling since 1994. I was in the past for over ten years but I was only gone from here for about five seconds, so was that a short or a long trip?

Anyway, I went, by myself this time, because in essence this was a business trip and I didn't need any help, not any help from any of my staff anyway, and Suzette didn't even complain that I wasn't taking her with me. She did give me a shopping list, though, so I had to do that and I had to make two stops, because I was going to the 1930's and she also needed things from the 1970's.

She (and several other members of my staff) claims that she can taste the difference between fruits and vegetables and even milk, meat and cheese produced now and those produced before World War II...and I'm wondering if any of you have noticed that. I can't tell a difference at all but Suzette says there is an oppressive chemical taste in everything we grow here. She has no choice at restaurants and when eating at friends houses of course, but at home, she will only eat produce grown prior to 1945.

So I took off to my destination, 1932, Oklahoma. My plan was to follow Bonnie And Clyde around again (I've done it a few times before) and get an idea for a new novel. It didn't work. It was fun but unproductive. I witnessed several robberies and bank jobs but nothing clicked as far as inspiration goes.

I skipped the final shoot out, which was on May 23, 1934, because that's just depressing. I thought about going to Chicago and seeing Dillinger gunned down at the Biograph on July 22 of that year but I didn't because that's depressing, too. So I went to Hawaii and spent the rest of the Depression there and watched Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941) from a nice safe roof top. Then I continued hanging out there till about 1950 and then came home. After going back to 1922 (There's a produce stand there that Suzette really likes) and then stopping in 1976 (I wish the idiots who run things here would start making Summit candy bars and Fruit Float again).

So, as I said, it was fun but I didn't get anything out of it. I guess it was about 16 years altogether and I didn't get anything out of it. So now I'm stuck with things to buy and an extremely limited income. You have no idea what that's like.

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Update:

Today (July 17, 2008), my little trip paid off. Sort of. In an economically worthless way. I did come with a novel and didn't write it but I'm not publishing it because of two reasons. Number one is that I'm not happy with it yet and I don't see that changing and number two is that my agent, Drusilla and my publisher, Bombastic Buskin (You might remember him, he used to be a famous accountant) are always telling me that I don't write too many time travel books and I don't want to listen to them whine about that.

This one is about a woman who is a history professor at a small liberal arts college in the Midwest. She's also a best selling author of historical romances but she doesn't make a big deal out of that. She writes under a pseudonym and it's not a big secret but she doesn't make a big deal out of it either and despite the millions she makes, she lives relatively simply and continues to teach as if it were her primary job.

So she's really pretty boring unless you count the fact that she created a time machine. While researching the Philadelphia Experiment, she read the descriptions of what was happening and said "I can do that." So she built a time machine with a few big pieces of metal and a couple of big homemade electro magnets.

She's still pretty dull, though...she writes boring fiction that a lot of women really love and she has a time machine but that's about it. She doesn't even use her time machine for research for either writing or teaching because she feels that that would be cheating...she thinks that it would be OK, if the playing field were leveled by giving time travel to every other author and teacher but she won't do that because she doesn't trust people with it. She thinks someone will use it for evil.

She uses her time machine for gardening. While playing around a little in the past (And not cheating by the way she defines it), she notices that things taste better, so she plants a garden in the past so far back that she doesn't have to worry about dinosaurs or people and grows everything she wants.

So it's a really dull book about a dull woman who really doesn't do much...oh, did I mention that she's a killer, too? That might be too strong an accusation because she doesn't have the heart to actually kill anyone but when pesky Men In Black types start showing up and asking her really uncomfortable questions, she lures them into the "time chair," which is an ordinary chair with a small time machine embedded in it.

She then zaps the troublesome person into the far past and what they do there is their business. "Sink, swim or get eaten by a large reptile, I really don't care," is pretty much her motto. So I guess you could say that she kills people...but you can also say that she doesn't.

So that's pretty much it. And as I said, it won't be published...till after I die and they put out everything that I didn't want put out. Unless I get really desperate for money, in which case I will put it out and I will also tell Dru that I spent 16 years writing it and that will set a new billable hours record for me.

Of course, I'll probably tack on a romantic subplot if that's what ends up happening. I'll have her fall in love with one of the MIB's or maybe one of the WIB's (Women In Black)...yeah, she might be fun as a lesbian. Anyway, right now, I'm just going to go out to the pool and have a drink and judge a monokini contest or something and just try to forget the fact that I'm broke and have no imagination and just hope that tomorrow is better.

Current Mood: depressed
Current Music: Coast To Coast AM---Monday July 14th, 2008