Day 79. 70 pages, 33,036 words.
So it was a fun and busy midsummer weekend and now things are looking even crazier. Lots of fun though, and I’m looking forward to getting started … I’m just not sure how much time I will have for blogging. Or working on The Last Days of Earth. Wondering if I should take Mrs. Hatboy’s advice of a few weeks ago and just concede that I’m writing tons of stuff (that is still part of the wider story) and suspend my word count until I get some of that out from under, and get The Last Days of Earth finished sometime later in the year.
But it’s already past midsummer, so it is later in the year now. I don’t know, I’m still hoping to get it finished in 2019 and I have an increasingly better handle on how it’s all going to work, but I’m just not sure how long it will take to fill in those gaps.
My attempt to drum up a little interest in my money-making venture resulted in a brief scramble of bidding and plot / character requests that sent me to some very odd places. It also quickly achieved my casual goal of earning enough PayPal money to pay for the packages of Zelda: Breath of the Wild DLC expansions that I wanted to get but Nintendo wouldn’t let me buy with my bank card. So I bought those, but haven’t had time to try them yet because now I have a book, or at least a solid short story, to write.
I also don’t have time to try the Zelda DLC because Wump had her birthday on Monday and got Let’s Go: Eevee as a gift so she’s been happily busy playing that.
I think what I might do is post a couple of teasers here on the blog, then release my Dirty, Dirty PayPal Whore story along with a couple of my other short stories as a side-publication, as planned in my five-phase plan. I’ll make it cheap, make sure everyone knows most of it is available on the blog for free anyway, and get e-copies to my PayPal Johns (and Jonnifers, respectively) in some form or other. I think I promised a little short story here on the Hatstand and implied a larger inclusion in the literary urverse, so maybe each of the donors can get their own little random segment here and then enjoy the full story which snowballed into a full-on published part of the plan way faster than I expected (but about as fast as I should have expected). Hopefully that will satisfy them that they got their money’s worth.
If not, most of them know where I live.
Hatboy's Hatstand 
I think what I will wind up offering on the blog is a “character study” intro to each character that will be worked into the main story, which will then find its way into the publication I have planned.
Sounds like a solid plan. Also, as we have all acknowledged before, Mrs. Hatboy is a human of the reasonably intelligent variety. Taking her advice on this one might be a good idea, as editorial staff have noticed in the past that when you force it to hit the deadline, the story is complete, but requires more explanation in editorial meetings to wrap their heads around. You have a long way to go before you hit Rothfuss/Martin levels of delay. Relax and give it the attention it deserves.
That is greatly appreciated, considering you are one of the (very welcome) hurry-up cattleprods in my arsenal. If I have your leave to backburn (at least for a while … while still writing something), then I’ll gratefully backburn.
I suspect this next book, call it a mythos anthology, will be ready quickly. Will have to think about what sort of editing we give it, I know some of the blog stories need a certain amount of narrative filling before being actual stories, but maybe if I bill them as “taken from the blog / get them free there” it will only require minimal work. Let’s see when the finished product is ready.
And she actually suggested I stop for a while back at Day 29, and I haven’t made noticeable progress since then, so there you have it.
Welcome back. Sorry I didn’t join the whoring, not sure if that surprised you or not. Not planning to get into any explanation.
I’m really here to figure out why it’s called “midsummer” when summer just started 4 days ago. It’s really confusing, man.
No sir, wasn’t expecting you to! And now I have enough on my plate and have collected enough money for the moment. Fun experiment and now I’ve got a new boost of energy.
I guess it’s called midsummer because it’s the summer whatsit, solstice or equinox or whatever, the longest day and shortest night. After that the days start shortening again. Not sure if that was a weather- or possibly vacation-joke.
Interestingly, I learned from my sister-in-law that midsummer is called Juhannus here because the early Christians tried to subsume what was basically the paganest bunch of godless naturefuckery in the country. They declared it to be John (Juhani in Finnish) the Baptist’s nameday and Saint Day, and everyone was like “okay, but we don’t have to do anything, right?”
Sort of like Easter, but for Jeebus’s understudy.