A really rough day of writing today.  Lots of things demanding my attention at work (silly work, intruding on my happy writey time) and more roadblocks falling in my path.

But, as we learned in the previous post, when we hit roadblocks – WE DRIVE THE FARGO AROUND THEM.  (We, here, would presumably be me and my slavering pure-id writing alter ego.  Do NOT feed him caffeine.)

From the current vantage point, from the lofty peaks of oh, a week and a half in, seems to be this: the action of writing a play within a play, while I think it works brilliantly onstage, does not translate particularly well in a book.  Or, if it does, let me amend by saying: I do not know yet how to do it right.  I wrote the first sort of split scene today, and oi, was it an exercise in frustration.  I kept finding myself leaning back in the chair, saying to myself, “god, I really don’t like that,” or, “there’s got to be a better way to do it,” or, “WHY IS MY DOORBELL RINGING AT 7:30 AT NIGHT, WHAT ARE WE, SAVAGES?  No, I don’t want to change my cable provider, you can have a nice tall glass of go to haberdashery, now where was I, oh yes, this passage I just wrote is godawful, maybe I would like to talk to you about my options for upgrading my high speed internet for just a little while, please come back?”

Sidenote: writing at home is HARD.  First of all, there’s the sprout, whose demand for attention is akin to a black hole’s demand for swallowing all matter in the universe.  Basically inescapable.  (And yes, I know that black holes no longer exist, or maybe they do, SCIENCE CAN’T BE TRUSTED.)  Then there’s my dear pregnant wife, who needs as much of my attention as I can give her, and bless her, she deserves it, which is why this post will be extra short so that I can get some quality Walking Dead time on with her.  Then there are door-to-door salesmen at 7:00 at night, apparently.  It’s so much easier to take some time on my lunch at work or get to work a bit early, to close the door and bang out some piping hot words and then go about my day safe in the knowledge that I have achieved a personal goal today.  Twenty minutes writing in isolation is worth an hour of writing in the den, and I will take it whenever I can get it.

Of course, as you may have gathered, that did not happen today.  I got about 600 words in during the day – a good showing, but short of the mark – so I came home to hammer out a few more.  And I got them. Oh, boy, how I got them.  Subvert the roadblocks, leave them for Future Me to deal with, move on to something a lot more fun to write and hi-ho Silver, I ended up with 1200 words today.

So I’m still on track.  The Project.  Day 7.  It’s gonna be a thing.

Here’s my favorite passage from today’s session.  Might just have to make this a regular feature.

• Bernardo was a local man who was very well paid to keep Harold’s drink topped off, to have Harold’s breakfast ready when he came down in the morning, to screen Harold’s phone calls for him, and to otherwise stay the Fargo out of Harold’s way and pretend not to speak English, thank you very much.  For these modest services, he was ridiculously well compensated, and was happy to suffer a week’s worth of abuse once or twice a year.

See you tomorrow, bandidos.  Pew-pew!  (That’s a laser gun six-shooter.)