2020 Begins and Serial Saturday Continues
No, I haven’t forgotten about…
Oh, hang on. First of all, let me say thank you to everyone who has sent me a welcome-back, get-well, merry-Christmas or Happy-New-Year. I wish I could have responded to each and every one of them, but…I know it sounds like an excuse, but I’m just so damn tired. I read them all, though, and each one made me smile. There have been days when even that ticks my energy bar down, so I’m sorry I couldn’t write you all the personal thanks you all deserved.
Secondly, no, I haven’t forgotten about my Road Trip Adventures here, and I know I’m now TWO months behind in documenting it….
Wow. Two months.
I feel like it’s only been a couple weeks, and I’ve slept through most of it, which is weird, because if anything, I’m sleeping LESS than ever before. What I’m doing is more like sleep-waking through my days. I’m okay. Sutures closed, everything healing better than I had any right to expect, but I’m…just…so…tired. Not sleepy. Tired. And I’m learning that there’s a huge difference. Then the holidays came around, with all that comes with it, and while I had a great Christmas with my family, it took a toll. They told me the road to recovery was going to be measured in months, but I really thought when the pain was behind me that I would bounce back, and that hasn’t happened. It will, but it’s taking it’s own sweet time, and in the meantime, I have to pick and choose what I do with my limited energy. So you will see more of Cupcake, just please understand why it’s taking so much longer than I planned/promised.
However, I do have another chapter of my fanfiction ready for reading (I hope. Because that’s the worst part of the fog that’s eclipsed my brain these days–finding words is so much harder, and that’s coming from someone for whom finding words has NEVER been hard). I think last week was actually when it was due to go up, but…yeah. I don’t even remember last Friday being a thing that happened. It’s a short chapter, but only because, once again, it was originally over 30 pages long and I had to break it down. This is just where it broke best, in terms of the flow of the story. And we’re coming close to the end of this book, after which there will only be one more and then I come to the end of this series. I’ll miss it. I’ve had more fun writing this than I’ve had writing anything in a long time, just because there’s absolutely no pressure to make it saleable. It’s dark, darker than anything I’ve ever written, and it’s got an undeniably goofy-looking cast of characters, but I can honestly say I’m proud of it, and as excited as I am to start the next project, there’s still a part of me that’s sorry to leave Scott Cawthon’s sandbox and return to my own backyard.
Anyway, the next chapter is up, so if you’re reading Everything Is All Right, Part IV: New Faces, Old Bones, head on over to archiveofourown.org or fanfiction.net and check it out! I promise I’ll try to update Cupcake’s Road Trip Adventures before the next chapter is due…and hey, Ana’s on a Road Trip, too! Must be Fate. With a capital F.
[image error]
Ana’s GPS had promised the drive was less than three hours, so Ana planned for four, but at the three-hour mark, she was still in Utah. Away from Mammon, city-traffic was full of commuters who were all convinced they were going to heaven and didn’t mind who they took with them. Exits were closed. Detours were confusingly marked, if at all. Ana had years of experience driving in Los Angeles, but she’d gotten too damn used to Mammon’s empty streets and relaxed atmosphere. By the time the first hour was behind her, she had a splitting stress headache on top of everything else.
Even if the highway had been empty, she would have been late. As much as she wanted to get there, this was a heavily-loaded unfamiliar truck on unfamiliar roads in heavy rain. She took it slow, stayed alert and drove defensively, but no matter what she did, it could never be careful enough to appease the nervous bear in the back. Anytime she changed lanes or had to brake suddenly to avoid hitting some other jackhat, or hell, if the road itself just curved a little too much, she could expect a knock on the cab window, followed by Bonnie’s increasingly long-suffering voice passing on Freddy’s request that they stop somewhere because ‘she’ needed a break.
She tried not to let herself get too impatient with him, she really did. She understood that this was his first road trip, since he’d been shut down for transport in the past (something she came to appreciate more and more as these delays stacked up). He was making a hell of an effort here and the least she could do was meet him halfway, so yeah, she pulled over at a lot of scenic turnouts and read a lot of historical markers through the viewing holes as Chica exclaimed excitedly over everything she saw.
But it was easy to be sympathetic for the first two or three stops. After five or six, sympathy was in short supply. With eight came annoyance and by the tenth, she was just trying not to swear at him.
At last she came to the mountains, where the storm that had been following her since leaving Mammon turned to flurries of snow and sheeting ice, and the next time that knock came on the window behind her, she told Bonnie flatly that she was not going to stop in the pass and to quit asking or so help her God, she’d go right off the edge of one of these narrow winding roads and plummet a thousand feet down a steep icy slope and explode on the rocks at the bottom. She needed her goddamn concentration for other things, so they’d better find their fucking happy places and leave her the fuck alone.
“You heard her,” she heard Bonnie say in a tone that made it plain he had reached his limit with this shit, too. “Just deal with it.”
