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This week on Adam and the Ants:
We spent a few minutes putting away tools, then Mr. M asked me to pull some storage crates out from under the bench and sweep out the sawdust and cobwebs. I pulled out the crates and Mr. M started knocking off dust and cobwebs with a whisk broom. I started to reach under the bench with the broom, and a movement in the shadows caught my eye. When I realized what it was, I stopped cold.
Ants!
A half dozen black carpenter ants, just like the ones I had captured for my ant farm, were milling around in the corner by the bench's leg. I cast a quick glance behind me. Mr. M was still whisking dust off the crates and hadn't noticed anything— yet. I turned my attention back to the ants, wondering if I should tell Mr. M about them or not. If I didn't tell him, they could damage his home. If I told him, he would want to kill them. Ordinarily, that would be the easy choice to make. But Mr. M might ask me to help with the extermination— and these ants were likely related to the ones in my room, the ones which were a constant source of peace and calm over the last two stressful months.
"You guys shouldn't be here," I mumbled under my breath. "It's not safe for you here." One ant broke from the group, turning toward me and coming out a few tiny ant steps into the light. It looked up at me, twitching its antennae in— defiance?
I'm out of town the rest of the week, heading to NOLA for some pre-Mardi Gras festivities. Chapter 8 is queued for posting Thursday. Hopefully I've gotten the formatting issues straightened out!
This week's song is What's Love Got To do With It by Tina Turner. The Adam and the Ants 'soundtrack' is available for free listening on Spotify at http://bit.ly/13U48s1
UPDATE: Found a copuple of typos and formatting glitches, which are now fixed.
For whatever reason, Chapters 7-9 gave me a serious case of writer's block and even when they were done they took a lot of rewriting. I knew exactly what I wanted to happen, but I just couldn't make the words come out. It probably didn't help that the rest of the story had already been written. I already knew exactly what was going to transpire, so perhaps my motivation was diminished? I only hope the quality of my writing didn't suffer along with it.
The Adam and the Ants 'soundtrack' is available for free listening on Spotify at http://bit.ly/13U48s1
This week on Adam and the Ants:
What would Bugs Bunny do?
The answer came to me in a flash. Bugs would flummox him with backhanded flattery, insulting him while making him see it as a compliment. Could I pull it off? If he twigged, I might end up looking less like Bugs and more like Wile E. Coyote after an encounter with a 16-ton weight!
"So, Grasshopper," Miller leaned forward while he talked so I had to crane my neck to keep eye contact. "You had something you wanted to say?" I could feel every eye within a hundred yards staring at the two of us.
"Um, just, you know," I stammered, "Just… Well… You keep calling me Grasshopper, and I still don't understand why, and it got kind of old." Bugs Bunny's backhanded flattery, it seems, had gone right out the window the moment I opened my mouth.
Miller's cheeks and ears reddened and his grin became a scowl. "I'll call you whatever I want to. And let me tell you what's getting old, Grasshopper," he hissed. He leaned down until our noses were almost touching. "What's getting old is all you pissants forgetting who's in charge around here! Maybe it's time somebody gave you all a reminder?" He accentuated the last bit by cracking his knuckles.
This is the part where I get flattened like Wile E. Coyote, I thought....
This week's songs are Friend or Foe by Adam and the Ants and Run to You by Bryan Adams. The Adam and the Ants 'soundtrack' is available for free listening on Spotify at http://bit.ly/13U48s1
Adam is a bit more mobile now, but it looks as if he's about to get himself into some unwanted trouble....
Well, dear reader, we're now halfway through Part 1. I just finished a marathon re-write of Chapter 9, which is now roughly twice the size of most other chapters. Therefore work on Part 2 is a bit behind schedule. Part 2 is much better outlined at this point than Part 1 ever was, so I'm confident I'll be able to crank it out much faster than Part 1.
This week on Adam and the Ants:
A short time later, Eddie nudged me with an elbow. "Don't look," he muttered, "but I think one of the girls sitting with the Heads is looking at you."
Of course, the first thing I did was whip my head around to look.
Scanning the area where the Heads congregated, I found the girl Eddie was talking about and made a split-second of eye contact with her before she looked away, blushing. She was about my height, and cute in a plain-Jane sort of way. She was dressed nearly identically to her contemporaries in jeans and a black t-shirt, but while the others wore heavy eye make-up and had their hair teased out to extreme lengths, she kept her hair in a simple pony tail and wore little if any make-up. She looked familiar, but I couldn't place her.
I dismissed Eddie's belief that the girl had been watching me for any reason other than the novelty of my cast and crutches. Why else would anyone be looking at me?
Adam finally gets to see what all the excitement about Tito's is about. It also seems that Adam has an admirer...
Only one song this week: "Bully" by Shinedown. This is one of a select few songs which weren't out by 1984, but are included for their near-perfect fit in the story.
The Adam and the Ants 'soundtrack' is available for free listening on Spotify at http://bit.ly/13U48s1
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