This is me noticing how little time there is until this month’s deadline. :-{

This is me counting how many days will be lost to other activities between now and then. 8-O

This is me still not buckling down and getting my work done. 0:-)

This is me writing a blog entry instead of a novel. :-\

This is me keeping my blog entry short so I can go back to staring at my blinking cursor, while still not getting anything significant done. >:-|

The weekend was good. I didn’t write quite as much as I hoped, but I did get the ball rolling. I have four writing days this week, so momentum is good. I’ll have to cut down some of this material, or else it will take too long to introduce my hero, but this is all really important to know so it’s not wasted time. More writing tomorrow.

Finished reading yet another book… and I even took the dog to the field yesterday to run around. AND I made instant pudding. Talk about a productive weekend.

Drove up to the Denver Book Mall this afternoon for a dual reading/signing by two local authors and had a great time chatting afterward.

Matt rotisseried a fabulous beef roast for dinner. Yum yum.

This is what the dog looks like when she would really like to join us on the couch:

Okay, so usually she rests her chin really pitifully on the couch cushion, but she’s a camera ham and she perked up as soon as I had it in my hands, so this is as close as I could get to the real thing.

And yes, that’s Pride and Prejudice on the TV – PBS is running the AMC/BBC version in its original episodes, and this is the second time Matt has picked it to watch instead of any of the other viewing options.

Yes, I win at life. My husband voluntarily watches Pride and Prejudice with me.

In defense of his manly sensibilities, I feel the need to mention that he’s playing Starcraft while he watches P&P. I’m worse at Starcraft than I am at Halo. At least in Halo I just spin around looking at the ceiling. In Starcraft (or Warcraft, or any of the other build-a-civilization games I’ve tried in the same vein) I actually kill off my own people. In the tutorials. Yes. I realize this is pitiful. I don’t know how I do it. All of a sudden, my troops are attacking their own barracks and I don’t have any idea why.

I’m wicked good at Diablo II, though. Or at least I was, when I had the time to play.

I came thisclose to hyperventilating when I saw our credit card balances this month. In a panic about the amount of money we apparently let flow like lifeblood in the month of January, I issued a household moratorium on buying anything not immediately related to the continuance of life (i.e. food and medicine), conveying us to school and work (i.e. gas), or furthering our education–until the end of March, at the very least.

Then I looked more closely at the statements and realized that we spent a lot less than I thought, because we paid both our tuitions last month. Januarys are brutal that way. But I’m sticking with the not buying stuff thing, because buying less is a good thing in terms of financial stability. Also, not buying things means not spending valuable Writing Time shopping instead of writing. Not that I ever do that….

Unfortunately, it also means I can’t just swing by the bookstore and pick something up for fun with all those 30% off coupons they keep emailing me. But I’m confident that I’ll survive. It might get rough sometimes, but I’ll pull through somehow. I hear they’ve got these new places called libraries, and rumor has it you can use their books for free! Imagine that!

I’ve also decided that I’m unplugging all internet access this weekend. Matt will be up in the mountains for the youth group’s annual ski trip, and I can’t really express how much I need to buckle down and write. There will be no hanging out on the couch all day Saturday watching movies.

So what will I be writing? Well, I need to finish filling the gap between my new beginning and the old one, and then I think it’s past time to get down to business about my B’nei stories and legends. And, if by some miracle I work my way through all of those, I’ll pick back up at the tournament where I left off back in October.

And maybe I’ll play around with Vince and Audra a little bit, too. I still haven’t decided whether they’re good for anything more than fiddling at this point, but I think they do well together so I’m going to keep working on them here and there and see where it goes. Regardless, they’re a diversion so I can keep writing when I need to redirect my thinking about the thesis, so they’re secondary no matter what.

So don’t expect to see me online after tomorrow at noon, responding to emails or chatting or anything else. And if you do see me, harass me in whatever fashion you feel suitable until I come to my senses and return to work.

Thanks. I owe you one.

We got caught in extra traffic on the way to work today (crazy how that can happen when we pull out of our apartment complex, drive 3 miles up that road, and turn into my office building’s parking lot) so I called ahead from the car to tell them I was on my way and ask if someone could unlock the front doors for me on time and watch the lobby for 5 minutes. The message that picked up was different than usual, so I listened for a few minutes instead of immediately punching in the extension I wanted to reach – turns out the office is closed today and nobody told the receptionist (me). HA! I mean, yeah, I knew there was a company retreat happening for some departments, and I knew tons of people weren’t going to be in the building off and on throughout the week, but somehow it never quite got passed around to me that the building was officially closed for the day.

So Matt dropped me off at Starbucks instead of at work and I read while he ran some errands, which he’d been planning to take care of after he took me to work. And now I’m back home getting ready for an extra day of writing.

I got just under 1,400 words written yesterday afternoon, which is the most I’ve put down in one day since the end of October. That’s a very good thing, and I’m feeling good about moving forward. I forgot that we had plans to go to dinner at our neighbors’ place, though, so I had to stop earlier than I planned to get a shower and look presentable after several days of sweatshirts, yoga pants, and a sloppy ponytail. On the up side, we had a great time and I think we have new friends in the building, which is fantastic.

I’ve got a few emails to respond to, and then it’s back to writing. Woohoo!

I just don’t know how to tell the next part of the story, which is odd.  Usually this kind of prolonged stall in one area means I’ve gone wrong somewhere, but I can’t figure out where or even if that’s the problem.  Nothing stands out as the place of derailment.

But I’m going with a combination attack today.

Part 1: BICHOK. Butt in chair; hands on keyboard.

Part 2: I dedicate today, yet again, to writing excrement. It did seem to have a positive effect on my word count last time around.

The heater under my desk is on. My rice sock is providing a toasty warm place for my feet. My pot of tea is brewed and staying warm on the desk next to me. Matt’s even working on school stuff today (his classes started yesterday), which means I don’t have to tune out the sounds of TBS and video games all day like I did while he was on break.

There’s no reason I shouldn’t turn out at least 2k words of horrible rubbish today. Twice that would be even better, but that won’t happen unless I stop typing here.

….aaaaand go.

The writing, despite all my good intentions, has been going very slowly.  

I’m tempted to say it’s not my fault, but that would be a lie and I’m only that bad a liar in the minute and a half after I’m woken from a dead sleep.

Today, I’m at work. This means my mentality is that I can’t get writing done, despite the fact that so far all I’ve done is answer eight phone calls and make an announcement. I’ve been here for an hour and a half.

So, since I’m stuck on the writing and nothing types out on the screen reading anywhere near as good as I know it should AND I’m at work, obviously the day is shot as far as writing. That is, writing anything good.

Which is why I’m dedicating today (aside from the times when I have to, you know, pay attention to the job they’re paying me for) to writing as much horrible drivel as I can dredge up.

That’s my goal: Terrible writing. All day. I might not even try to punctuate correctly. (gasp!) I certainly won’t even dream of deathless prose. I will kill my prose at every possible opportunity.

What do you need to do badly today, just so you can say you got it done?

Well I’ve already created designations for Brewing Days and Writing Days, so I might as well keep coming up with ways of categorizing my working methods.   

In that spirit, today is officially an Ironing Day.

You see, sometimes I brew ideas up and toss them together and I start writing, and I realize that I’ve gotten to a place where things that weren’t terribly important to know about before are now more important. Sometimes these are things like “I don’t know how Devlin’s plot arc climaxes and resolves.” Sometimes it’s working out the finer points of a religious or a magical structure, or how those two types of structures interact and influence one another in my world. Sometimes it’s just issues that I’ve avoided working out because I knew it would take time and I’d rather do things that make my word count increase.

Regardless, today’s been a day of ironing out a variety of those types of problems. In the summer, I often do this sort of thing on a bike ride, talking out loud to myself as I work through ideas, keeping the ones I like in the tumbler and tossing out the ones that don’t fit well in the mix. Since I can’t do that at this time of year (it’s 10 degress outside with a fresh film of snowfall on the ground today), I’ve been avoiding the ironing process for quite a while.

Reaching a new level of desperation, I decided to try working my ideas out on paper – I’m not writing my novel longhand now, mind you, just using pen and paper to follow the flow of my thoughts about the writing a little more clearly – and it’s worked quite well, I must say. I’ve got three sheets of notebook paper covered continuously with writing and musing about various problems I’ve been butting my head against for a few weeks now. It’s not organized so that someone else would make much sense of it, but that’s not the point. I was going to stop the writing work and go run errands this afternoon, but I want to keep working, so a trip to the grocery store will have to wait until after dinner at least, and maybe tomorrow morning, depending on how long this ironing groove lasts.

Very cool.

Also: Shiloh has learned how to ring the bell by the door when she needs to go out and do some business. Victory!

We all know I have a singular talent for putting off work, but I’m reaching new depths today. And, of course, I seem to be coming down with some kind of cold/flu thing, which muddles my already sluggish novelesque thoughts.

Pitiful.

Frustrating.

Maybe I need to put the computer away and work on paper for a while. It certainly can’t go any slower than it is already.

Well I got rather a lot of things done yesterday, but I didn’t sit down and write.  Fortunately, the things I got done are allowing me to take another shot at the writing day idea today and hopefully get things done.   

In the meanwhile, I’ll give you a bit more Shiloh. It’s a well-documented fact that she prefers napping on our shoes or jackets whenever they’re available. With the recent run of extreme cold, we’ve had a lot of snow pants and winter jackets hanging about, and since we don’t have a handy place to hang it all up to dry (we’re working on that) we’ve taken a section of our dog fence and put it against the entryway wall as a “jacket corral”. It’s not very sophisticated, but it beats having winter gear strewn about the living room. Anyway, Shiloh sneaks into the jacket pen and makes herself a bed out of whatever happens to be there.

I’m biased, but I think it’s pretty darn funny:

Happy New Year!

Plans changed for Saturday, so today’s the writing day instead… unfortunately, with Matt home and playing Super Mario Galaxy on the Wii, I’m going to need to go into the office to work.  Trouble with that is the office windows leak and we haven’t been able to get maintenance out to fix them, which means the office usually ends up being about 10 degrees cooler than the rest of the apartment.  I’ve got a space heater under the desk and I’ll have my tea, but I really don’t want to go in there.  Also, at this point I hardly remember where I left off writing, much less where to start today.    

Maybe I’ll work on my legends. That’s not a bad idea.

I checked my flight info for Friday, when I’ll be traveling to PA for residency, and realized that I’m getting up at a ridiculously early hour. I’ll be a zombie by the end of orientation. Just you watch.

Also, I have no idea what to wear for the “come as you aren’t” wine social on Sunday. Ideas?