November 11th, 2020:
A lot happened over the last week. Nationally, we had an enormous, tense and drawn out election that still isn’t fully resolved… but is resolved enough that I’m very happy with one result. ;-) On the personal side of things, my trio of problems from last week are no more: My wife is feeling better, the car is running, and the furnace heater got fixed (thanks Kevin).
Then on Friday morning my brother was rushed to the hospital after several days of small heart attacks. :-( Yes, 2020 isn’t done with us yet.
The good news is that he’s on track to make a full recovery after surgery on Monday, and is now home. But it made for an uneasy weekend. He and my sister are on the Trump spectrum and have said at times that the pandemic is “a hoax”. This has caused family tension, and yet, my brother cited concern over COVID-19 as one reason for not going to the hospital until he got so bad that he needed an ambulance. There’s also the fact that heart attacks in real life aren’t like they’re portrayed in fiction. Often people think they’re stomach-intestinal issues and dangerously ignore them. This almost killed our father over 20 years ago— dad was hauling lobster traps by hand having heart attacks out on the water— assuming he had “a bad stomach bug” for a few days.
You’d think my big bro would remember that. But whatever, I’m just glad the loveable palooka is okay. :-) This moment of crisis combined with the political shift over the weekend seems to have opened my siblings’ eyes a bit. Both sound disillusioned with Orange Man. I can sense a lightening of the air, and perhaps the beginning of some family wounds healing after all the divisiveness.
I’ll take that, and I’ll pray that it holds.
Writing wise, between the tension and chaos of the weekend, I wrote my daily microfiction pieces for this week. I’m trying out a new method of crafting the coming week’s pieces over the weekend instead of taking a week to write and schedule a month’s worth of them at a time. Given everything that happened this weekend, the initial start didn’t go well and spilled into Monday. But my hope is to create a sustainable schedule where I get the coming week’s micros done over the weekend with personal time left for weekend evenings. Then I’ll have most weekdays to write longer format fiction.
A second accomplishment was completing the Arium: Flash commission and submitting it on Monday.
With those two projects done, I got back to work on finishing The Forever Halloween. Tuesday’s efforts found me doing some heavy editing and adding a little to the novelette’s ending, growing the piece to 9,700 words. I’ve now started editing in and writing a short new scene into the last chapter that will strengthen the story’s finale. That should get me to somewhere over 10,000 words, and where I’ll call it the sixth and first completed draft. After an editing sweep and proofread, I’ll send it along to those that would like to check it out.
Take care everyone! Be safe, and keep writing!
~Jason H. Abbott
Aethereal Engineer 
Leave a Reply