About last night...

Last night I wrote about 850 words of a thing. Not really a story. A scene, maybe. Mostly dialogue. Some descriptions of the speakers. Nothing special.

But.

I can't remember the last time I had written any fiction at all. It's been years. It felt good. As does this. It's weird trying to hold a thought together for more than 280 characters for a tweet. Like I said, it's been a while.

The past two nights I've written mainly between midnight and, say, 1:30am. The house is still and quiet. I'm not distracted, maybe half asleep, and that seems to work well for me. So far, anyway. At least I haven't turned back to booze yet.

I bought a bottle of whiskey when I left my last full-time job. I told myself I wasn't going to open the bottle until I had a new job. It's been a year and a half and I still haven't opened it, which is frustrating. But I'm glad to know that I have the willpower not to open the bottle regardless, despite often being depressed enough to want to.

I watched Annihilation yesterday, Alex Garland's adaptation of Jeff VanderMeer's novel. The book left me a little cold and unsteady, like I was unsure of what I had just read. The movie has flashes of that, but it's so bright and colorful and lush with gorgeous scenery, the story being told almost didn't matter. It was mesmerizing. I should have seen it in a theater when it came out, but I think I was still recovering from my foot surgery at the time, and I didn't want to hobble my way to the movies. Still, I bet it was gorgeous on the big screen.

I'm also about 80 percent of the way through Bruce Springsteen's autobiography. Last night, after I wrote, I read about his kids and his father, which succeeded in making me think about my father, as if I needed any prompting to do so. Our fathers were very different, though similar in some ways. Mental health issues being the biggest. What I most enjoyed about that section was Bruce trying to come to terms with who his father was and how that was different from who his father wanted to be. Part of growing up is realizing that your parents are people, too, with the same faults and problems that everyone else has. Parents had dreams of what their lives would be like and those dreams didn't always pan out. And I think about my father and all the things he maybe had wanted to do, but didn't, for whatever reasons.

I'm not sure what I'm going to read next.