Smokey Mountain Breakdown

Today I wrote most of the day. Got a good bit done. Haven’t started reworking the first scene of my cockfighting story. I have to sort of let all that good research filter through my head. I did go over my notes and think about it a bit. I got some work done on The Ghosts are Dancing and finally got to the porn part of Porn and Donuts. I’m about ready to do the combine of those two stories and get the first rewrite of those sections done.

For the first time in a very long time, I’m pulling out my thesaurus. They say the Inuit have 90 words for “snow”. The Ghosts are Dancing is really stretching my vocabulary for things having to do with water, rain and wetness. Can’t be helped…it’s a flood story.

I’ve been having these pounding stabbing headaches. I think I figured it out, though. It’s the Sjogrens. My eyes have gotten so dry that my corneas are scratched. I just wasn’t paying attention to it. Have stepped up my eye drops and it seems much better.

I’ve been very upset over something that happened last week. A kid who has been providing a service for me for two years, who I have liked and have treated with fairness and respect, cheated me. I don’t know what it is about the people in this place that makes them so prone to dishonesty. I’m not quite sure how to handle it. Unless the wrong is righted, I won’t be using him again. It’s a shame since I know he needs the money. And it’s a huge bother for me to have to call the 30 something people I recommended him to and let them know that I can no longer suggest that they hire him.

Ah well, it will end up in my writing one way or another, I’m sure. But it saddens me.

The third part of The Ghosts are Dancing is up on EditRed.

As the sun slowly sent the first tendrils of dirty light into the holler, the devastation became more and more evident. All the pastures were flooded. The newly tilled fields were a sea of churning water. A few of the cows and horses had survived but were huddled miserably near the house where the water was most shallow. One of the barns had been swept away and the footlogs and bridges had long since been washed downstream. The corpses of drowned hogs came dancing down the rapids where the creek used to be, washed pale and obscene by the water. And Joel heard the screaming of the cattle who had not made it to safety, mired to their bellies in the mud and water. Their white faces straining to breathe above the water, until it closed over their heads and they screamed no more.