Word Count Update

I am spectacularly on target at 15,155 words. In case you were wondering, this is 30.3% complete. I confess to feeling a little smug.

Behold another excerpt, proof that what I am writing is actually slapstick comedy:

When Tom looked up, Professor Ignatius, the unconscious Dudley, Yellin and his dart gun, and the Longbow and its crew were all gone. Instead, Tom appeared to be in a kind of waiting room. It was long and narrow and all the walls were white, and the chair he was sitting on was cold metal, and the five chairs to his left were all metal and, he supposed, cold. There was a closed door on each of the narrow ends of the room. Tom was by himself.

He stood up and tried the door to his right, but it was locked and of course he didn’t know the correct entry code to type in. As he reached for the knob of the left hand door, it turned, and the door opened with great force, striking Tom in the forehead.

Congratulations to me for (almost) reaching the one third mark.

The Prayer of the Scientist

From Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis, which I am enjoying a good deal:

God give me unclouded eyes and freedom from haste.  God give me a quiet and relentless anger against all pretense and all pretentious work and all work left slack and unfinished.  God give me a restlessness whereby I may neither sleep nor accept praise till my observed results equal my calculated results or in pious glee I discover and assault my error.  God give me strength not to trust God!

Thus prays Dr. Martin Arrowsmith, whose blinding love for the laboratory I wish I could mimic in my own art.  Sinclair Lewis quipped something to the effect of, ‘Martin worked through the night at extremely tedious procedures.  He did not realize they were tedious.’  Wouldn’t it be wonderful to love your work that much?