After finishing a doodle, I came up to my chair to write some words in my ping-pong story. Chuck had thrown down a challenge after reading my veiled request for an extension yesterday. I knew there was no more ducking Story. The thing was I didn’t feel very good about writing. In truth, I was dreading it. It turns out my dread was misplaced. I steamed through a thousand words of Story. The words weren’t great, but I didn’t have anything planned, and an actual character—okay, a very derivative and almost caricatured character—grabbed my hand and took me for a short spin. I don’t know if anything will come of it, but I do feel more confident about getting a first draft out by the end of the month.

I think my doodling is helping my writing. The doodling puts me in a more creative and less judgmental state of mind. It feels good to write words and not worry about where I’m heading or what I’m saying. We’ll see if I can duplicate this feeling and write Story tomorrow night.

Doolies is flying back on Friday, which means only three more days of loneliness. Doolies showed her mother my doodles. After looking through the squiggles, Doolies’s mother became very concerned about my well-being. She diagnosed me as depressed. Doolies assured her that I was always like this. I guess it’s true. There’s a part of me that is always like this. It doesn’t matter how busy or how happy or how tightly I hold the Doolies. It’s there, always waiting, distant and alone. Until my monsters, I didn’t have a consistent way to share that part. I guess my consternations were a painful release valve. It’s nice to have other mechanisms that don’t grate so much on my two readers.

It’s growing late and I need to clean up today’s doodle posting, and maybe draw another one. I have a nice pile of doodles waiting for posting. It almost pains me not to post them all immediately. But I like the one-a-day schedule. It allows me a little leeway if I decide to slow my output. It also gives me a chance to touch up the older doodles, and rewrite the titles.

I enjoyed today’s writing, and I don’t want to end this missive. But I won’t bore you with more words when I have nothing left to say.