that monkey is going to pay

Long day. Went from work to South Pointy where I parked myself at a table in Barnes & Noble and free wrote for about a half-hour. Worked thru a couple of exercises that Sharon had suggested last week and jotted down some things that I'd seen during the week and meant to write about but never got around to. Had dinner at the Q Shack there. Good stuff, of course. Had the sausage and it was nice and smoky. Yumm. And from there went straight to class. We started working as a group to create a story. Well, tonight we really only got as far as the beginnings of sketching out a protagonist. But it was interesting to watch the collaborative process and the creative process at work. And now I'm home. The Ricardo Montalban film club is convening in the living room but I'm too fried to socialize so I'm in the study blogging and listening to music (iTunes on random; Jolly Mukherjee just at the moment)

One thing I wanted to mention from the weekend -- spent a goodly chunk of Saturday afternoon surfing the internets for info on death, suicide, hanging, etc. Amazing the stuff you can find. At one point I ended up on the pages for some museum in Australia or New Zealand that had some exhibit on death. Somewhere along the way I saw a mention that one of the things you could get the death penalty for in England in the early 19th century was attempted suicide. The mind boggles. Probably I was spending way too much time on all that searching. The story I'm working on for WriMo has a suicide by hanging as a small but crucial plot element. Driving back from XDU I heard a story on "This American Life" about the people that clean up crime scenes. Which pointed out to me that I'd incorrectly written in my story that the police had cleaned up the scene after the event. So going back in to fix that got me wondering if there was anything else I'd gotten wrong about a suicide by hanging. Probably I should have just kept writing and left accuracy for December. But I've pretty much come to the conclusion that I'm not going to be able to write 50K words by the end of November. As long as I keep writing, I'll consider the month a success no matter what my word count at the end is.