Joy

I'd forgotten how excited you get when the end of a deployment starts creeping closer. With shorter deployments, of course, you don't get real excited about going home until about two weeks out. But with four months, the anticipation starts to build a bit sooner than that.

Yesterday I put in my pax request to go home. This may sound odd, and in fact it is—we have to actually fill out paperwork to be permitted to go home. Obviously it's a formality, since the deployed unit doesn't have the authority to keep you more than a few days past your expected departure date. But it is still sort of funny, having to do the paperwork. And it's also sort of exciting—if I didn't have to throw in the paperwork I wouldn't be thinking about going home yet, but of course now I am. And I'm just giddy with anticipation.

Okay, that may be going a bit far. But it may help to explain the sort of things I've been writing lately in this November novel I'm not working nearly fast enough on. (All the same it'll be an amusing thing when it's done.) For example, consider the following:

It was inevitable that an impressionable young man like Cartwright would fall into the seedy underground of the music performance business, working with such notorious musical gangsters as Joel "The Piano Man" Williams and Vinnie "Three Fingers" Dragovich, the noted Serbian banjoist and jewel thief. By the age of twenty, Cartwright was running an illicit distribution ring for throat palliatives and medical tape, and five years later he made his name with the great Horn Mute Heist of '72, which forced the cancellation of an entire season of the Porktown Philharmonic and nearly brought down the stock market.

I've been having great fun coming up with titles for the comic books published in Porktown: Megatronic Superzoids, Ratboy and Catwoman, Fungible Man, and of course Lusty Pirates!, my personal favorite. In addition to the Reporter, a noted comic book superhero available to Porktown readers is Creamy Porridge, "a superannuated superhero popular with the over-80 set." Who wouldn't want to read that?

I feel like posting a picture, so here is one of Looking Glass Mountain in North Carolina.

I'm not sure where this little book is going, but The Reporter is a character in the book and also a superhero in a comic book in the book, although I don't think the comic book is based on the character. Although I haven't even started his backstory (I know what it is, though), it appears as though I've laid the foundation for his main villain, Canary Cartwright. It's interesting, I came up with The Canary's name without realizing that Cartwright was one of the dozen parts of Van's name (Van being the character who starts the whole thing off). Clearly the two are related (and I've been watching too much Bonanza), though I haven't figured out how yet. They don't seem to know each other very well, if at all. I'm not writing fast enough to make 50k by the end of the month (especially with the safari), but it's certainly entertaining. At least it's entertaining me.