Day Two

At the end of yesterday’s post, I teased that today’s goal would be one that was nearly a decade in the making. To be specific, it’s actually been 9 years, 6 months, and 13 days, which is honestly a damned long time. I mean, I’ve got a kid that’s only (roughly) three quarters of a year older than that. Hell, depending on how far back you’ve been into my archives, you’ll realize that’s just about as long as Puddintopia has been this form of Puddintopia.

Don’t look at me all confused like I just nudged you and whispered something about the rattlesnake at dusk. That was a hint! About whatever the fresh hell I’m talking about today!

Is it cinnamon cakes? Wait, are you ask me? If you’re asking, well, I do really like cinnamon cakes. But not so much marshmallows. They’re too gummy. But cinnamon, oh yeah. Man, back in the day I could take apart a box of Brown Sugar Pop-Tarts in a flurry of crumbs and a wild haze of processed brown sugar paste. But I believe I’ve stood on the Brown Sugar and Cinnamon soap box around here before, haven’t I?

Hrmph. Now I want dessert.

What’s that you said? Hint? What hint?

Oh, right. That! Yeah, so I actually started my “120,000 words about nothing” crusade exactly 9 years, 6 months, and 16 days ago. Which means whatever I’m talking about today, it started 3 days after I took to the blog-o-sphere in earnest. In that time I could have gone to the moon!

Spoiler alert: I didn’t go to the moon.

The clever among you may have already loaded up the Time Machine and gone back to check out what I’m talking about. Hopefully you didn’t change the past, or at least, if you did, you got the Stones back into place without opening up any alternate realities.

The less quantum-minded but more pragmatic might have accomplished the same thing by simply slipping into the archives here and rolling back to February 2nd, 2010. If you did that, good work. Also, thank you for not time traveling, and enabling Biff’s rise to maniacal power.

Not all my readers will recognize that post, but some of you might. Those that did will maybe recall that the piece I wrote on that February evening so many years ago was actually the shaky, first draft beginning of what eventually became my first completed novel, Famine.

So what does that any of that have to do with my Day Two goal? Well, the cinnamon and brown sugar, not much. But, for Famine? Well, here’s Day Two, completed:

It’s starts with Chapter One, and the very first sentence belongs to a dude named Tom. Today’s goal was to start writing a sequel to Famine.

Chapter One of what I’m thinking of as Fury is currently only about 517 words of fiction, and most of them will likely get cut in my first pass of edits some months from now.

Why now? is a question I’ll answer in the not so distant future. But it isn’t an accident and it’s not just because I need goals for my Goal 30 shenanigans.

Regardless, as far as the actual novel goes, I’ve got a long way to go, and only about half a plot formulated so far. But it’s a start, and one I’m pretty tickled about.

Especially because nothing ever got finished without a start.

Pud’n