Bluetoothing the Novel (sorta redux’ed)

Maple bacon cheddar pizza, I say, repeating what she just said to me.

I need a snack soon, she says.

A swoony-jazzy song plays like it’s 1967– remember the smarmy song playing in The Graduate when Bancroft is making the hard play for Hoffman — well some white bread m.o.r. tripe like that is playing in our background. But we’re both the same age, she’s only 3 months older than I am. We’re just living through a pandemic Monday.

She stands up, unable to take it anymore and announces, snack! What snack do you want?

Before I can answer she’s walked out of the room and turning on the kitchen light.

She says, snack! What snack do I want? In a husky manner like she’s a hibernant bear just awoken.

Then comes the crinkling of the plastic bag and the tinkling pretzels. I imagine the blue bag of organic pretzel twists — the pretzels falling and caroming around a small glass bowl until the scale reads 1 oz or 28 grams, depending on the setting she used — she’s a 1 oz type.

The crinkling of the bag again. The clasping of the white chip clip on the bag — it might have been the black clip — and she walks into the room again. A deep guttural sort of crunching amplified in her mouth as she walks past me to the desk.

These are extra crunchy, she says, facing the laptop. The crunching continues, a gravelly molar-assisted deep crunch.

Today is the 32-month anniversary of the day Gov. Baker sent people home to work out the pandemic. That’s Massachusetts.

Everything But the Girl’s debut album, is bluetoothing through the blue Sony speaker. It’s not really smarmy music, I just felt that particular conceit at the moment. I ask her what the make of the speaker is.

She asks why I want to know the make of the speaker. SRS-X33! She says.

I was researching how porn would sound through the speaker, I say. (Obviously not, folks, I was writing this!)

Huh, she says. Did you say corn or porn?

Corn porn!, I say. It’s supposed to sound amazing through the speaker.

She ignores me. She knows me.

I should be working on my 50,000 word novel right now — but I hit 57,632 words yesterday, and I haven’t written a word on that project since.

I have written many other words nonetheless.
(Take these for instance!)

Anyway, there are only 2 days left until the artificially imposed November 30th NaNoWriMo deadline. (NaNoWriMo: National Novel Writing Month, now in its 23rd year! My fifth consecutive year participating.)

Like I said, I’m procrastinating.

The pretzels are consumed.

It’s time to get to work.
But I keep on writing this.
Such is life.

What I’m Reading:

“50,000 words in one month is a lot, and it’s okay to acknowledge that a lot of those words won’t be the perfect, engaging, gripping storytelling you want it to be. That’s okay!”

—Kalynn Bayron / “Pep Talk from Kalynn Bayron”