Sad Stories

I can only tell sad stories today.

The hero dies before he saves the girl and the magic drum.
Terror strikes an old woman’s heart, and she fails to overcome.
An evil wizard attacks a village, a promising youth runs away,
but he never meets the wizened hermit, nor returns to save the day.

I did not intend to rhyme,
it just came out that way.
But I’m not afraid to tell you,
it’s been that sort of day.

But now I did the same rhyme twice and so the spell is broken.
So finally I am back to tellin’ the reason I was sulkin’.

Yeah, I just rhymed ‘broken’ with ‘sulking,’ please, someone shoot me.

This is why I don’t write poetry.

Moving on….

I don’t believe in ‘disorders’ or ‘conditions.’ If it isn’t proven via strict scientific method, it just don’t exist in my philosophy. But – I do admit there is something about dark, short days like the ones we have now in Philly, that just kill any inklings of creativity I might think I have. (As the bad rhymes above must surely prove.)

I feel like a day in which I don’t create something is a day wasted. I’ve done the math (ok – actually I went to this web site: http://7is7.com/otto/countdown.html) and if I live to see the tricentennial (for you non-Americans, that is the 300th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, or July 4, 2076) which is my plan, I only have 23,213 days left.

Now, according to Wikipedia’s list of the world’s most prolific writers, A Spanish writer named Corín Tellado wrote 4000 novellas, or about 120,000,000 words (if her novella’s were 30,000 words long.) After her, the next highest is the English author, Charles Hamilton who wrote 100,000,000 words in his lifetime.

If I am going to beat those two fine writers, I need to write 5169 words a day, every day, for the rest of my life. Take that, NaNoWriMo’s of the world! My biggest obstacle though is that I like to write really short stories, a thousand words long at the most.

What all this math boils down to is this: I need to write five stories a day. And a short, gloomy day like today, when I can’t think a single creative thought, is not helping me at all.

I seem to have no problem doing math though… Maybe I’ve missed my calling! Oh no! Is it too late to start over?