April Progress Report

April was a stellar month- perhaps my most productive since last August. Part of it's success comes from the declining demands of my "real" job as the ebb and flow of my work year sees my workload subside to something resembling more of an 8-4 job. Being less tired at the end of the day makes it easier to either sneak in a bit of writing at the end of the day, or wake-up early the next day, since I prefer to do most of my writing in the morning. During most of January and February for example, I was so tired, so often, that I was sleeping in most mornings and missing these prime writing sessions. Also, for much of April I had a really good trend going of starting to write early Saturday morning before everyone woke up and then continuing to write as I waited outside my daughter's music class.

The other thing that turned out to be surprisingly influential was sitting down and watching Wes Anderson's Darjeeling Limited. While most of my friends are evenly split on the value and enjoyment of Anderson's movies, I found Darjeeling Limited's depiction of a dysfunctional family trying to reconcile in the wake of the family patriarch's death extremely helpful to dealing with some of the themes of Games of Chance, a story I'm writing that has as one of its themes family dynamics between cousins following the death of their grandfather. My initial reaction to Darjeeling Limited was to borrow the model of the three brothers but the more I considered this and planned it out, the more options became apparent to me. In the end, Darjeeling Limited made me realize that their many different paths I could take to get to where I wanted the story to go, and once I saw that, a lot of words started flowing.

The other big thing to happen in April was that I shared some of the basic plot points from A Saturday Afternoon By The Slurpee Machine (relax, it's just a working title based on the opening scene) with Good Grief Lucy and she recommended some twists that I really like. Her feedback allowed a lot of other ideas to tumble out, so hopefully I'll be able to build on some of that momentum in May.

Finally, and this won't show up in the word count tally, I actually flipped through the unfinished writing I had done for The Liminal Trip looking for a description of something that I thought I might want to use in Games of Chance. It rekindled my interest in this piece and I even jotted down a couple of paragraphs - though of course, my writing style has changed a fair bit in the last ten years. It will be interesting when the time finally comes to edit The Liminal Trip to insure that it has a consistent voice.

Short Stories:
"Of Light and Darkness" - in revision*
* this is part of my Twilight of the Idle short story series along with"Labellypock", "A Night on the Fronde" and "Out of Time (Ped Xing)"
"How My Uncle Faught The Spanish Civil War" - 1000 words
"Il Brute" - 700 words, a short story about living in Bridgeland

Novel Ideas (and working titles):
A Saturday Afternoon By The Slurpee Machine - 6474 words, growing up in NE Calgary, circa 1990
Games of Chance - 23355 words, quasi-related to the current economic downturn
The Last Days of the Daily Wenzel - 8154 words
Father Borsato di Sangi - notes only, about a priest in small town Alberta, circa 1910, - 127 words
Mt. Pilatus Calls My Name - notes only, a corporate satire- 3111 words

Sisyphus In Hell/I Was Misinformed - 2402 words

Good Ideas At The Time (Whole draft novels):
joculatores domini - in revision, a novel about parking attendants and the Calgary Stampede
The Liminal Trip - in revision, backpacking through Europe,

Trump Project: 1533 words

April's Total Word Count:45156