September 27, 2015 – Simple Tricks & Nonsense

We’re currently between rounds in the Round of Words in 80 Days challenge. If you’re a writer-type and you want a very flexible “challenge,” now is the perfect time to check out RoW80!

Updates & Goals

Writing

Wrote 3633 so far this week on “One Ahead #2”. That’s shy of my 5000 goal for the week, but the number of notes I’ve been leaving as I write are stacking up and I think it’s time to do a quick revision of the first 6200 words.

My plan is to finish the rewrite/revision by tomorrow and top out the week with a manuscript of 10K.

The Publishing End

All is well-ish in publishing land. The Martian Engineer’s Notebook, Volume #2 is free this weekend on Amazon and it’s had a good amount of downloads. We’ve also had a few sales of Vol. 1 and some page reads of other works.

Goal for the week: Decide on what we’re promo-ing during October and submit Luck for Hire for our first paid ad.

Classes

Already in my last week of Intro to HTML. There’s a short quiz and a final project due this week. The final project is a simple webpage built to spec. My only worry is that the spec will not be communicated clearly enough. It’s back to work in Python for Data Structures; quizzes and assignments galore.

Blogging

My blogging plan fell off the bottom of my to-do list last week, but that’s okay. I finished reading The Great Failure by Natalie Goldberg, but I really didn’t feel like blogging about it. I caught-up with Deal Me In too, but the story was pretty “eh.” Haven’t finished the Deadlands book yet.

Upcoming:

Tuesday: Review of Psycho
Friday: Peril on the Screen update
Saturday: Deal Me In
Sunday: ROW80 Round 4 Goals

“The Little Maid at the Door” by Mary Wilkins Freeman

Card picked: A Ten

Thoughts:

Joseph Bayley and his wife Ann ride from Salem to vote in the election in Boston. Though the scenery around them is beautiful, they are only caught up in their own fear. The Proctors have been arrested for witchcraft and the couple must ride by the Proctor’s house. Every single thing in the woods incites panic. Was that a goat in the bushes or the Black Beast of Satan? And those yellow birds? Maybe they were just yellow birds or maybe they were Goody Proctor’s familiars gone to report to Satan himself about two innocents riding through the woods! This section of the story is told mainly in dialog and that really amps up the feeling of paranoia.

As they pass the Proctor’s house, Joseph thinks he sees Goodman Proctor and Goody Proctor, who are currently in jail. Ann only sees a little maid at the door of the house, who looks like their dead daughter Susanna. They ride past, unmolested, but Ann contrives a way to go back to the cottage. Is the little girl the ghost of their daughter? Or maybe an image contrived by Satan to woo Ann from her husband? Surely, it couldn’t be young Abigail Proctor left to fend for herself after her mother, father, and sister were taken away…

About the Author: An educated woman, Mary Wilkins Freeman produced dozens of short stories in the in the late 1800s and early 1900s, many of which combine the domestic and the supernatural.