The Odds: Eighty-Three (Part V)

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I’ve already talked to you how I came up with Eighty-Three. I don’t understand why you’re asking me about it again. It just that the thing is that a four part story sounds weird, and I’ve already scheduled out one more week for this, and I’m not yet ready with the premise of my next story anyway. I had an idea for this final part, though. What was it? Dammit, I completely forgot what random thing I was going to talk about. I blame you. Oh yeah...no forgot it again. My sister’s chatting with me online. Give me a second. The lottery! Yes, that was it! Do you remember how this story started out with me claiming that I won the lottery? Well, I’ll explain that to you. Just to make sure you know, I make $11.95 in a job I don’t hate, but with very low weekly hours. I absolutely did not win the lottery, which makes sense, because I only played it once. And when I did so, it gave me the idea for what eventually transmogrified into this story you’re reading right now.

The story was originally not about me at all, and was planned as a standard novel. Think Slumdog Millionaire meets 2007’s The Winner. What’s that second one, you ask? It’s a Rob Corddry show about a guy from the present telling the story about how he was once a loser, but eventually grew to be successful. He..might have won the lottery, or he might not have. It was pretty bad, so I didn’t exactly give it much thought. The point is that my story, originally entitled simply Lottery, was about a guy who uses a special set of numbers for the lottery, and ends up winning. And the book goes over what each number means to him; why he needed to use them. Upon decided to start my website, the idea was truncated to weekly series form that I was intending to write sometime in the beginning of my second year. That ended up being what happened, but not everything went as planned, obviously. I sat down on my computer a few weeks ago, knowing what story I was about to start, but not having any clue how to actually follow through. This was the Saturday of, literally a few hours from deadline. So what was I going to do? I did what every bad writer does: I wove myself into the story. I created a fictional version of myself and laced him with exaggerations, straight up lies, and warped perspective. I just had to get something out. And this isn’t the first time its happened. Nearly any continuous series I’ve tried to write that doesn’t take place in a canon I’ve already created ends in disaster. Siftens Landing, Mr. Muxley Meets Mediocrity, and this weeklong group of microstories about a bunch of vehicular collisions. They were all bad, or worse, and those first two have been stripped from the book version I’m releasing later this year, along with this. Really, the only series I like that doesn’t belong to salmonverse or recursiverse is my Perspectives microstory series. And even that is hit or miss, depending on my mood, how much sleep I’ve had, and what I have yet to do that day.

This series was supposed to be a couple more installments long, but I’ve had to truncate it because of how little interest I have in continuing it. It’s no longer a story at all; more of just a collection of random thoughts. So the next two weeks are going to be a fairly short story, supposedly told in second person perspective. If you recall, back before I even had a short fiction website, I posted a little thing in second person on Facebook. It’s also told backwards. I considered it to be my first microstory, and reposted it here, so you can read it. If you want, whatever, no big deal *shrugs and blushes*.

I just went through thirteen years of photos, and thirteen years of calendar events. I was hoping to find an interesting story I could tell you about myself, even a fictional one inspired by my life. But the truth is that I desperately hope that no one is reading this at all. I’m just going to quit while I’m behind and end it here. I’m sorry to have wasted your time. It’s just as well seeing as I need to focus on The Advancement of Mateo Matic. I made some major arc breakthroughs yesterday and today. Eighty-Three more installments to go until we can get to August 5, 2151. What’s the significance of that one? Dunno, that’s too far in the future. Do I seem like the kind of guy who plans well? I just wanted to mention the numbers one last time. Speaking of non-sequiturs, here’s a picture of the time I jumped into the air in the basement and plugged the shop-vac into the ceiling socket. Not impressed? Let’s see you do it. But the ceiling we use has to have two and a half feet on you.