Wash it Away

I finished the last of the specialized passes for the current draft of Falling Star yesterday.  I did a half dozen specific passes – dialogue for certain characters, visual and active language, improve descriptions, and clarity of story (which added 2 pages but addresses the concerns I had from my first two readers).

I celebrated by “saving as” Falling_Star_03 to signify the end of draft 2.  I can let it sit about a week before I have to decide whether I’m going to move it from New York City to Alexandria, Virginia to qualify for entry in the Charlottesville Film Festival.  There are strong cases for both moving and staying.

 

Thanks, Marc, for the Ghost Train lyrics

Wash it Away

And then the sky broke up

We have a thing in our house.  The lyrics to songs become distorted.  Sometimes it’s funny.  Sometimes it just doesn’t make sense.  I went to school with a girl who sang about “dunder cheese.”  She didn’t know what it was – neither did anyone else – but that didn’t prove the real lyric was “done dirt cheap.”

And then the rain came down

She doesn’t live in our house.  I don’t even remember her name.  In my house confused lyrics make a little more sense.  Like “do you want to play with matches?” and “bowling with my peeps.”  Okay, maybe not a lot more sense but wouldn’t you rather enjoy ten frames in goofy shoes than be rolling in the deep?

And then it washed away everything on the ground

The rain last night swept away trash cans and potted plants.  I discovered that a porta-potty needs to be more than 2/3 submerged to float away.  Roads were blocked.  Rails had trees on them.  And there were raindrops on kittens.

Wash it away, wash it away, wash it away

There is great evil in the world.  An evil that we do not often see and rarely have to face.  When it shows itself, when you see it for what it is, things change.  There’s a stain that won’t come clean and a pallor clings to everything.  A line crossed, an innocence lost, a Rubicon.  And you scrub as Lady Macbeth scrubbed.  And you pray for rain as Honi did.  And you keep on riding.