Still on vacation, kind of

I milked the system to gain a small vacation for writing purposes. New Years Day was a holiday, I took Thursday and Friday off, then the weekend came, and my flex day is Monday. It took some manipulation, but I gained some reasonable personal time by doing it.

Old What’s Her Face was off all the same days, except for tomorrow. There is good and bad to this process. Understand that we’ve been married for a long time, and sometimes you just need your personal time. Still, we watched some movies together, even managed a date night last night. Our son gave us a gift card for Christmas, so we had a nice seafood dinner on a weekend where we didn’t get paid.

I wound up going into a different room to do a bit of writing each day. I spent a few weeks making a playlist, and wrote with music in the background this time. This is theatrical stuff, and normally fades into the background, except for those few pieces that grab you and force you to listen. I know people love playlists, so here’s a brief list of some places I sampled from:

• Last of the Mohicans
• Kill Bill
• Once Upon a Time in the West
• Wonder Woman
• Pirates of the Caribbean (of course)
• The Forbidden Kingdom
• The Exorcist
• 47 Ronin

There are a few others, but it covers a broad spectrum. I intend to keep adding to this, because some days it helps the words flow. I’m going to scope out a few other old films, but will wait until payday before doing so.

It’s a whole different kind of music from my Lizzie and The Hat playlist. That one is full of old Rock and Roll, Blues, and a few other cuts from odd places, even Glam Rock.

Writing happened. Every day was over a thousand words, but I never had one of those blockbuster days. Those just don’t come along very often.

My pirates explored Bungo Bungo, the floating island. I had a lot of fun coming up with new creatures for a rather magical place. The Omcrom were a lot of fun, but I struggled to keep them mundane. I wanted tribal creatures that were rather benign, since everything else that shows up is murderous or carnivorous. They’re about knee high, wear simple leather togas, walk upright, but occasionally use their knuckles in a four legged trot. They have long tails, and the beaks of sea eagles. They’re trimmed out with moss where hair should be, but I didn’t go into detail about whether this is a modified form of hair or feathers.

In typical Lanternfish style, you get a glimpse of their culture, but no more than my pirates might observe while they’re on Bungo Bungo. I kind of want a bit more from them, but there is one more encounter as they’re leaving the island. That one involves the root monsters, and could turn out well.

There is also the gigantic oil toad that seems to be in charge. He even gets dialog. Then I came up with the idea of the boatmen, which aren’t men at all. They’re scary and nasty.

I have a couple of images on Pinterest that I melded together to create the Omcrom. These are line diagrams of what an artist calls trolls, and I think they are wonderful. I also have a few images of Stellar’s Sea Eagles, that became part of their makeup. Here is my piracy board if any of you are interested. I can’t share someone’s graphics here.

The pirates reached the cave and obtained the tidbit of information they need to return to the war. I still need to get them off the island and back to the ship. After obtaining the info, I should probably move on fairly fast. It’s going to take a couple of days to get back to the ship, and I don’t know exactly what I’m going to do with that section. I even managed to weave in a callback to Voyage of the Lanternfish, and a couple of small ones to Serang.

I started at nearly 40K words, and stopped today at 47,700. Not a real productive vacation, but I did some things with my wife along the way, too. We watched Captain Marvel, and I don’t think it deserved some of the fanboy bad press it received. I enjoyed it. I also polished off the last two inches of my prized bottle of Laphroaig. I’ll have to budget for a new one come payday. Don’t panic, there are still a few treasured bits of bourbon in my cabinet. I’ll survive. There are also a few pints of stout around here.

With a stellar day tomorrow, I’d like to work up to 50K. I also have to make that root monster scene come across well. I’m going to hit it hard tomorrow. I’m tempted to come up with another monster or creature, but Bungo Bungo might be interesting enough now. I’ll figure that out as I go.