Dispatches, thoughts, and miscellanea from writer Jon Konrath

Nothing, heat, Young Ones

Things have been slow. And once again, hot. It’s almost October, but I think I’m going to have to run the AC tonight.

I’ve been spending many of my free cycles trying to write a trip report for last July, when I went to Vegas and Colorado. I’m about 5/8ths of the way through it, and it’s about 8,000 words. So I might have to do some sort of design to split up the days or whatever, maybe put some photos into the body of the text to break it up a bit more. I really don’t like writing stuff like this after the fact, but even with the laptop, I’ve become so apathetic about keeping track of things during the trip. I think part of it is that I’ve been to Vegas enough times now that the novelty is not there, and I can’t do a story like the one I wrote for my 30th birthday, where everything is new and wonderful to the reader. It’s become repetitive, although I do find new things to do each time. But there’s a different between introducing the concept of the Vegas buffet and finding a buffet that is a dollar less or has a make-your-own taco station. I don’t dislike going to Vegas at all, it’s just the writing part, at least without a mission, has become tedious. But I feel that if I don’t write about it, ten years from now I will be working on some project and be furious that I didn’t. At least that’s the way I feel now about a lot of things that happened ten years ago.

I did absolutely nothing this weekend except spend money that I didn’t want to spend, and mess up my nutritional situation. I’ve been getting incredibly picky about what I eat, and the thought of pretty much any genre of food disgusts me. And without the Star Trek replicator in the kitchen, I’m limited as to what I can order. And of course I could buy a ton of crap and try to cook the food myself, but that takes planning, and this whole downward spiral of bad food planning is because I don’t think about this shit ahead of time, and it’s 9:30 at night and the only thing to eat in the house is a Lean Cuisine dinner that has been in the freezer since 1963. So things have been off, which puts me in a bad mood and prevents me from doing stuff like writing books or going out or whatever.

I did manage today to go to Best Buy to replace the battery on my piece of shit cordless phone, and I picked up the boxed set for The Young Ones, the old BBC comedy that was on MTV late Sunday nights back when MTV was almost cool. I used to love that show, and then it was impossible to find, and then some crappy VHS tapes came out. Now they are on DVD, and they are great. I watched the first six of them in one go this afternoon, and they are funnier than what I remember. I did not watch the one with Mot