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I'm going to attempt to write the better part of a chapter book that has been lurking in my brain for several years... THIS WEEKEND. I suspect 30,000 words is too much, but I wonder if I could get down 15k, ie, half the project.

I'm not usually great with the stuntwriting, and writing fast--for me--usually ends up being "writing fast for the sake of writing fast." But I'd like a chance to get out of my own way, as it were, and I want to produce SOMETHING, and I'm not sure how else I would produce this without some "buckle down, stunt-it-out"-ness. I have greater faith in my revision powers than I've ever had before (there's nothing quite like practice makes perfect), and am less married to my "near-perfect draft" strategy than I once was.

(Since I hate rewriting so much, and was for so long so bad at it, I made every effort to write super-good first drafts. Sort of "revision as we go" so I could fool myself it was part of the drafting process, and I wasn't revising things? But there's nothing like a rigorous edit from a lady in New York to get you to revise your thinking, haha, as it were.)

Speaking of fast writing: if you have been waiting for Scrivener for Windows, as I have, your wait will be over this winter. They will even have a beta available for National Novel Writing Month. AND, get this: if you finish your 50k for NaNo, and become a verified winner, they'll give you a 50% off coupon for Windows Scrivener--basically, Scrivener for $20. (http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivenerforwindows/)

I must say, while I don't need to save the $20 that badly, it's probably the best reason for finishing NaNo I've heard of lately. Enough for me to contemplate the logistics of how I'd win NaNo while in Germany and Romania.

I mean, if I stayed on target up until my flight on November 19th... would I be able to write enough in hotel rooms and on trains (the two biggest arenas of downtime on any trip) to win NaNo? Would I be able to locate an internet cafe and upload in a timely fashion? Should I contemplate this? It might keep me out of trouble in Europe, I'm thinking.

The only problem is--and it's a doozy--is that I'll be right in the middle of writing the next book, and I don't think I want to either stop writing it to do NaNo, nor submit the writing of the next book to the rigors of NaNo. No. I just don't.

So, that dream may've gone, as fast it came, but man. It's weirdly tempting.

Confess the first two things you bought from Amazon.

Mine are:

Of Swords and Spells by Delia Marshall Turner, probably because I couldn't find it in a bookstore (I'd just finished Nameless Magery). I'll note both of these books are still on my shelf, and I only keep things I intend to re-read, but I've never re-read these. I don't know how I feel about that.

Anyway, it was 1999, and I'm almost positive that's why I ordered that book, and initiated the whole order to begin with.

Now, why did I choose the other two things in that order, and which can be considered number 2 and which can be considered the afterthought? Dunno. But the items tied for second are a taped audio version of Stellaluna for wee little 4-year-old Kayla, and a book called A Point of Honor by Dorothy J. Heydt that I do remember, but certainly didn't keep.

My second order is a birthday present for my mom.

My third order is this:

Heh.

The As You Are Now meme:

Take a picture of yourself, as you are right now, no changing clothes or makeup or especially photoshop, and post it.

As a sop to my vanity, I did not post the one taken with the flash, but rather the one with the desk lamp. As a flash 3 feet from my face does not, actually, make me look as I look now, I thought the lamp one was more accurate anyway. Complete with bonus arm shadow over face.

(I took another one after, without the arm shadow, but it was less interesting.)

It was a nice day to do the meme, since

mrgeddylee and I spent several hours at Hidden Lake Gardens taking author photos of me, and my hair was done for the occasion (hours ago...) and I still have my make up on (though much of it has rubbed off). Not wholly inaccurate as a representation of me, either, since I wear make up to work, and my hair (nowadays) looks decent enough after a cut for several weeks with no special effort. I used to have SUCH frizz problems....

Stephanie Burgis asks (by way of this interview with Sarah Prineas):

"The interviewer asked whether Sarah would keep writing if she knew she would never again be published ...

What do you guys think? If you're writers, how would you answer that question? And if your vocation lies elsewhere, would you give it up if you knew you'd never get a paying job in the field again? I'm really interested to see what you guys think.

I've always maintained I would write anyway.

But differently. Oh, yes, differently! Here's how:

1) I'd never worry about finishing things, unless the end was the thing that inspired me to write (usually it's not, but sometimes it is). So, I'd write the first 20k of dozens of different novels, and write half-born short stories... And I would like it.

2) I'd never rewrite anything. (Almost never. If I did, it would be for items we find in number 3.)

3) I'd probably write more fanfic--but not a whole lot more. (Currently I average 2-3 pieces a year. I'd probably get up to 5-6. Maaaybe 7-10. Depends if I ever found a fandom I felt I could keep up with and enjoy.)

4) I would probably write a lot more id-originated pieces. (Though trust me when I say I already write from my id quite a bit. But I'd write more girl-with-pet-dragon-saves-the-world type things. Oh, yes, I would. Though now that I've said that... I might just write that anyway. Uhm. What was my point? Oh, right. I would probably worry less about clothing for my id. Yeah. There'd be more naked id running around. I try for id-modesty, as a professional.)

So, there you have it: the brutal confession.

All told, I'd prefer to have to clothe my id, rewrite my work, keep my work out of the realm of fanfic, and finish things rather than not get published--the morale boost of being paid for one's work is (for me) much higher than even the validation of a well-received piece of fanfic. (That said, I've never written fic that was tremendously popular, so maybe I'm wrong on that.)

The strictures--having to finish my work, having to rewrite to editorial order--that I would throw off were I never to publish again are not onerous burdens, but they are difficult, and while I don't avoid difficulty as a matter of course, I believe the perceived joy/work ratio is much smaller in rewriting than it is, say, in fooling around with the Orton effect in Photoshop when taking a portrait of my stepdaughter.

What do y'all think?

Sometimes, when I'm doing other things, I'm aware of the seething emotions and vibrant colors of an entire kingdom that lives somewhere between the strata of my conscious and subconscious minds.

Sometimes, a story will flash by like the memory of a dream, too fast for me to do more than acknowledge it, and feel it, before it's gone.

It's like a fish jumping in a lake--don't blink--oh, you only heard the splash--the fish disappears and the surface is smooth again.

I've spent hours, days, years of my life digging away at the water, trying to show the kingdom under the surface, but the water always rushes back in, and all I can take away is an old boot whose shadow looked like a fish before I pulled it out.

Sometimes I can carve the boots into credible fish statues, but I know what I barely saw when the fish jumped, and I know what I can't recreate--and that's just with the fish, not the whole kingdom beneath the waves.

The hind-brain knows we're done with the edit, because it attempted to sabotage me by not bringing down my jump drive this morning. Of course, I did email it to myself, so it's not like I have to get out of my chair and bounce up two flights of steps to go get it, so....

*fires up email*

The hind-brain attacks! Wave of nausea! Why did you eat a tiny sausage at breakfast? WHY?

*squints, and fires up email... harder. And by this I mean, goes to sent-mail*

Augh! Staring at the computer screen makes the nausea worse! I remember why I ditched this monitor--the lines, the LINES--!

*closes email*

You win today, hind-brain. We will pack, relax, and think about the what-next and how-better stuff on the drive home, and during the cleaning frenzy. Then, from 6 'til midnight, you will open the book back up. Plan on it.

The thing is, I did everything on my to-do list, and I have these very vague ideas of stuff I could do to make it all better--the least vague of which is to read it aloud, particularly the parts my editor wanted to really just, BAM, streamline (pages 230-280, which is such a minor fraction of the book, so it should be no problem to look at them again....)

But I swear, my body is in rebellion.

It's time for some rejuvenation. Perhaps I will go read. I forget the taking-care-of-myself parts of this business. *sigh* But no longer... tomorrow, I'm going to walk a mile. That's my only goal. This week, every day, I'm going to walk a mile.

(I would like to do it today, but that will depend on my socks getting dry in time for the rain to stop. Though maybe when I get home...)

Thirty days of TV? No. But I want to answer, because it's good stuff to do during my breaks from editing, besides reading The Fire in Fiction.

( Cut because we care. )

Was up at 7:30. Have eggs in me (tarragon and cream cheese scrambled eggs, tarragon to spice them without salt and cream cheese to stretch the eggs a little, as there were only two... we are deliberately dwindling down the cottage summer foodstock), and half a blueberry muffin. My father-in-law is going to install three-prong outlets so I can use a true monitor in the basement, and I am writing (first drafting!) on the tiny laptop next to the guinea pigs, while I wait. (I could start editing on the tiny laptop screen, but I don't think you know how crazy that makes me. I can settle into it if I have no other option and if I am very disciplined about it, but I'll need my store of willpower today for other things...)

I drove to the cottage last night through spurts of driving rain. I wasn't a fan of it at the time, since I was so sleepy towards the end, but it was late and traffic was light, and I only saw one animal (possum), and... I don't know. I had been planning to stay home last night and edit, then drive out this morning, but work was beyond crazy yesterday, and I knew the drive would unwind me. It did. I feel like a bobbin half-unreeled.

I unloaded the guinea pigs, came in, wrote five hundred brand new words on a brand new thing, and fell into bed. Woke from vaguely troubled but unremembered dreams to bright sun on distant trees and a storm-dark lake. But the storm is receding, and the dreams fled long ago. I think I have bad dreams to exorcise the bad thoughts from my psyche--and if I don't remember them, or carry them with me in emotion, then I feel that they did their job.

The guinea pigs are here because, for longer weekends, it's easier to bring them out than to ask someone to come in and check on them. We already bring Diabetic Cat with us on weekend trips, so what's another two pets? It's better for them to socialize with us all weekend than to see someone dumping food at them for ten minutes, anyway. I rather like writing next to them--they are cute but generally unobtrusive.

I guess that's all I've got right now. What's everyone else doing for the weekend?

My book, that is.

We are still debating the title. I dreamed last night that we'd decided on Reveka's Curse, which is awful, but in the dream logic, I was so happy to have a decision. Of course, I know from watching my friends go through this that the title debates could last forever.

My editor made up some dust jacket copy that makes me look smarter than I am. I'm like, "This sounds like a great book!"

I wrote my bio for the cover. The cover stuff heads off to copyediting soon.

The book is due to copyediting soon, too, but I have some work to do on it before that.

I have a list of things to work on: a dedication (done), an author's note, assembling some references so that a professional artist can draw a MAP, Romanian pronunciation guide, etc.

We have discussed a cover...

Seems like five months ago, I was languishing without a contract... Oh, wait, that was five months ago!

I'm reading this article (recommended by my old linguistics prof on Facebook--man, the world is different than it once was), and there's a whole bit about Guugu Yimithirr--a language that, when it was discovered by linguists, turned all their assumptions about language on end. Particularly, Guugu Yimithirr doesn't have "behind" and "in front of" but "to the north" and "to the south."

This paragraph in particular caught my eye:

Psychological experiments have also shown that under certain circumstances, speakers of Guugu Yimithirr-style languages even remember “the same reality” differently from us. There has been heated debate about the interpretation of some of these experiments, but one conclusion that seems compelling is that while we are trained to ignore directional rotations when we commit information to memory, speakers of geographic languages are trained not to do so. One way of understanding this is to imagine that you are traveling with a speaker of such a language and staying in a large chain-style hotel, with corridor upon corridor of identical-looking doors. Your friend is staying in the room opposite yours, and when you go into his room, you’ll see an exact replica of yours: the same bathroom door on the left, the same mirrored wardrobe on the right, the same main room with the same bed on the left, the same curtains drawn behind it, the same desk next to the wall on the right, the same television set on the left corner of the desk and the same telephone on the right. In short, you have seen the same room twice. But when your friend comes into your room, he will see something quite different from this, because everything is reversed north-side-south. In his room the bed was in the north, while in yours it is in the south; the telephone that in his room was in the west is now in the east, and so on. So while you will see and remember the same room twice, a speaker of a geographic language will see and remember two different rooms.

"You" doesn't mean "me," friend. Geographic relations are everything to me. I definitely see two different rooms.

Maybe this is why I get lost so much, by other people's criteria, but not my own. I'm not LOST. I know I'm not in the right place, and I know where north is. How is that lost?

I mean, I definitely still do "behind" and "in front" like an English speaker does, but in the greater world, I think by direction. I'm always correcting people who point southwest and say, "You know that bread shop over there?" And then I repoint and say, "You mean the bread shop north of us?"

I attribute this to my grandfather, who defined not lost by the same criteria I do, and didn't often get lost... and to my 3rd grade teacher, who spent ten minutes at the start of every day making us face the different cardinal directions and then point blindly to the other directions when she called them out.

So frustrated by unresolved computer issues right now. Bearable becomes unbearable with the application of time, or it can do. More to the point, "bearable for a day or two" becomes unbearable when it turns inot more like a week. Also? Moving all the peripherals to the system you think is fixed but is just being tested--tests one's patience. Also? Frustration is self-replicating, and communicable.

Now it's 11:11 and I've done crap.

On the other hand, I spent a couple hours working up the collage for my next (contract) book, using those other parts of my brain to get creative with my characters, and using general serendipity to lead to inspiration....

It was harder to do this collage than the last two because I've used a lot of my coolest, saved-up pictures and postcards, but I did have an old Waterhouse calendar that gave up some excellent pics of my main character, and on the web I found a completely awesome picture by a female pre-Raphaelite (Brickdale) of an armored knight holding a baby (click through the Brickdale link to see the pic). His back is to the viewer; all you can see is the expanse of armor, and the baby's face peeking over his shoulder and by gum, it was everything I didn't know and needed to about my male secondary character. I"m not sure if the baby is going to be in the book or not.

I tried something different with this collage. For one thing, I had more space to work with, which is maybe why it felt picture-short. I bought a science fair poster board and cut it into thirds--three 1/3rd height science fair project-sized collages await me. (The other two are for future books.)

The other thing I did differently was visit the scrapbooking aisle(s) at the craft store. That's a dangerous aisle, and this better be as close as I get to scrapbooking. I'm just saying.

Pics will have to come later, since I don't have my freaking computer to unload them.

My short story is up at Strange Horizons. It contains most of the things I love about the Underworld that I couldn't fit into ~~The Herbalist's Apprentice~~ ~~The Princess Curse~~ the whatever book. And because I couldn't even use the word damn in the book, the short story drops the f-bomb a lot.

Does anyone else do this? Write strange little stories that drain away the dregs of the things you otherwise might not let go of in your books? I only ask because I've done it twice now, for this and the Jane Eyre book. I don't know that it happened with The Bitter Road, but I also confess I didn't really have a process for that book, more a bull-headed determination, and who knows, maybe some other story of mine arose from that (I don't think so). Of course, I've written 3/4ths of a novel I am alternately calling The Perfect Prince(ss) and just Prince(ss) (entirely working titles), and no short stories have arisen. But I haven't gotten into the taking-out stage.

Anyway.

Day 0, day I submitted the revision: numb relief. "Thank god, some time off."

Day 1 after sumbmitting the revision: euphoria. "I don't have to write nothing. This sweet freedom means I can, in fact, write anything I want!"

Day 2: "I uhm. I guess I really didn't want to write very much. It's okay. You took the weekend off, remember?"

Day 3: "I no longer know how to write. Like a cruel incubus, that last edit letter emptied me of desire and ability."

....

Can't wait to see how I feel tomorrow.

Go over to the Word Frequency in Fantasy Titles 2009.

Connect words. There cannot be words in between your connections, but any direction is okay--up, down, back, forward. Create a book title of three or more listwords that makes a modicum of sense. AT LEAST a modicum.

Give yourself 1 point for each word from the board in the title.

Subtract 1 point for each preposition or conjunction you use that is two letters or less.

Subtract 2 points for each preposition or conjunction you use that is three letters or more.

The first article is free, but additional articles will cost you 1 point.

Add 1 point if you write a logline for the book.

Add 1 point if the title is so clear you don't NEED a logline, for the awesomeness speaks for itself.

By the rules above, you may create the series/trilogy/whatever title, and add ONE HALF of those points to the total (always round down; the tie goes in favor of the attacker in this game). (The words quartet/trilogy/series etc. are freebies.)

Example:

Zombie Wolf Apocalypse Assassin, book one of The Dark Red Kill Daughter Trilogy.

Zombie Wolf Apocalypse Assassin--while the title speaks for itself, honestly! It's about an assassin who runs around in the Zombie Wolf Apocalypse. Obviously, the assassin takes out Zombie Wolves and protects humanity and all that stuff. The reference to "Dark Red Kill Daughter" is, like, somehow related to Little Red Riding Hood or something.

I earned 6 7 points (Math??):

-4 points each for Zombie, Wolf, Apocalypse, Assassin.
-No deductions for conjunctions or prepositions.
-No article penalty.
-We'll give me 1 point for the title being as good as a logline; the logline I attempted is pretty much not one.
-2 points for the series title (4 words, no penalties, divided by 2)

Uhm.

*pant*

Draft is done!

About half-way through this draft, I sort of realized that this letter contained a lot of line-edits, and only three "big" things--and they were much smaller things than before--and maybe we were getting on towards the final draft?

I can't assume, of course.

My efforts to benchmark my editing times failed hugely due to poor time-keeping skills. Likewise, I experienced some serious time dilation. Also.

Tiiiiired.

I just have to do this short story thing, and then I'm taking through the weekend OFF.

It's probably good I'm getting this (*gesticulates wildly at life, the book and everything*) all done before school starts and the ILL office starts reeling with the training of new students and the barrage of books. (The tide is coming in!)

Yesterday, Merlin got his teeth cleaned. (Merlin is Writing Cat, for those playing cat bingo at home.) I was seriously (and slightly irrationally) worried that he was too old or weird to survive the anesthesia, but they did blood tests beforehand, and--well, as the vet said, "He has STRANGE levels--some things are high, some things are low--but none of them are indicative of any problem or disease or syndrome." I knew that cat was weird!

Anyway, he came through the sedation just fine, though he tried to do way too much on shaky legs once I got him home. Also, he wanted to eat several hours before the vet wanted him to, but he was hunting for food to the point of dangerously jumping up on the kitchen counters over and over and over... I gave him a little kibble, then a little more, then a little more, and he didn't barf, and the peasants rejoiced.

No extractions, either. Just some bad tartar and gum disease. Maybe now he'll start chewing his food?

The point is, I had to go pick him up, which meant leaving early from work--just two hours, though. To make a true half-day of vacation, I asked my boss to let me come in a couple hours late today. (Don't ask how the math works. I'd explain it to you, but it's not logical.)

Of course the stove decided to be delivered today. So--I would have been at work for about 3 hours, all told.

I did briefly consider asking the husband to take this one, but I've got the vacation and I need the writing time. Plus, I have a distinctly understanding boss. And it's still summer, from our point of view. In a few weeks, there will be no insta-vacation days. So, we had a good chuckle on the phone, and I have some of the lost time back in my editing budget.

JUST in time for my Strange Horizons edits to come in on "Five Rules for Commuting to the Underworld" to roll in.

Perfect! If I progress enough on the book today, I will absolutely drag the netbook over to Zingerman's Coffee Bar and look at the short story edits for a break (well, assuming I can time that with the stove arrival). And maybe even take a walk in the sunlight. I've gone from hunched urgency to feeling expansive freedom. What a difference seven hours makes!

I can even shower, now!

Grungy bookwork stuff, nothing to see here.

Of COURSE I had the worst cold of the last year and a half in the middle of this book edit. It took the wind right out of my sails. I was so exhausted even after the worst of it, and I was utterly non-functional for a week, and only partially functionally for the following week.

So, when I finally got back into a groove--my great-uncle passed away. I doled out the five hours for getting to the funeral and back, but of course my brain was far more taken up with grief and family matters than I would have cared to admit. Uncle Doc was such a gentle, good, kind, and funny man, and while I was quite positive that the 93 years he lived were good ones and that he was ready--he STRODE confidently into death, he did--well, you know. Death.

I'll save the reams I could write about all of this for later. And perhaps also for fiction. Or my private journals.

In any case, that was more than I anticipated writing when I came over here to say things that were too long for Twitter, but not THAT much longer, then...

Anyway. I had four full days off (including a weekend) to work on the book, plus an empty house for most of it, and I pulled myself groaning into the final stages last night. I had been diligently going through the book in order: edit a chapter or two fully--which is to say, address everything, major or minor, my editor wanted, including major cuts, line-edits, and emotional continuity checks; do a recorded vocal edit; balance some numbers (I'm trying to shrink this book, not expand it, and also figure out how long this stuff really takes me); move on to the next 1-2 chapters.

Then the full editing pass started accruing more chapters, and I was 7 or 10 chapters behind on vocal edits. Then more. (I had 39 chapters when I started this draft; I'm down to 36, but I'm also down 5,000 words and change.) I started to forget things this way, so I tried to catch up with the vocal edits. I ran into a few chapters where I had almost nothing to change on the vocal edits (chapters, interestingly, which stayed most true to earliest drafts; I guess my last draft wasn't as clean as I'd hoped, but the earlier ones were).

Finally, I basically looked at the time, and pushed through, SAT style where you pick off the easy targets first, to clean up the language, make the cuts, etc. for the last, oh--8 chapters? Leaving the emotional stuff for later.

Last night at 10:30 (bedtime is 11), I made a to-do list for today. I knocked off the first three (easier stuff), and if I can get one of the two major ones done tonight, it will be a true victory.

The biggest issue is that I have NO stomach for the thing that will take me back into the early chapters. I think I worked those over too hard--I can barely stand to look at them. Gah.

Anyway, that took 15 minutes more than I really have, but on the other hand, I may be glad someday that I documented this process.

In BETTER news, my editor wants to talk cover ideas. I'm pulling together my photo-references for her--exciting!

While it's common enough advice to read your fiction out loud to check the flow, someone somewhere recently suggested recording the read-aloud portion. (I think it was on a podcast. It was almost assuredly either Packing Heat or ISBW.)

I did this once a LONG time ago; I read huge swathes of The Bitter Road into the voice recorder I had at the time. It was... okay at the time. Of course, I didn't half know what I was doing with The Bitter Road anyway.

Well, here's version 7.5 of the Reveka/Romania/zmeu book, and I'm editing it per my editor's requests--AND right behind that, reading it all out loud for myself. At first, I paused the recording every time I hit something that needed to be fixed, and didn't let on what was fixed and what was old stuff. But now I'm in the recording swing of things, many chapters on, and I have started doing the whole process aloud. "Why did you use 'thing' twice in two sentences? Repetetive AND vague." And then I read the edited sentence, right after the bad first bit and the editing bit.

It's an excellent spur, too; if I don't feel the heart to go see what evisceration* awaits me in the next chunk of the line-editing, I just do a few chapters of what I've now termed "voice editing" and go on.

It helps with all the expected things--unclear antecedents and dropped words and editing artifacts--but where I am SURPRISED and DELIGHTED is how it helps with transitions. All kinds of transitions! Scene transitions. Emotional transitions. Logical transitions. To say that my characters occasionally make bizarre leaps of logic is to say that mosquitos like it hot and humid.

It is the single best thing I have done for this book, besides write the first draft.

------
* They are actually minor cuts and edits and comments. They are 95% of them good to extremely good to GREAT suggestions. The other 5%, I have no compunction ignoring. Yet, somehow, the sum total of all the cuts feel like major surgery. I wonder why this is.

I have excised a chapter and a half from the first half of my book. It remains to be seen if I have broken the characterization of two of the secondary characters thusly, but without a doubt, I have solved some pacing issues.

Let this be a lesson to me:
( The segment that would not die. Read more. )

In other news, I met up with Catherine Shaffer for a writing session today (I had the day off work)--and did some good work, but couldn't make the editing work on my tiny netbook screen, so had to bail after two and a half hours. We hit up Zingerman's Coffee Bar, which is relatively close to my house (closer than anything else Zingerman's)--and is a pretty great little space, but hidden in the midst of a number of industrial airport-area buildings. If they were open past, oh, when I get off work, they could be an awesome place to have evening writing get-togethers. But they aren't. However, I can foresee doing some "on the way to work" writing some mornings. Maybe as a Monday ritual (or perhaps Thursday, since my drawing class pretty much means I don't end up writing on Thursdays).

( And then there were stoves. )

Now, other than editing-editing-editing, that's been my day.

Okay, apparently rewriting is time for music.

I can't draft with music. But perhaps editing is different. Today, the brain wants the Tragically Hip--mostly infinite repeat on "Makeshift as We Are" which is only kinda sorta a little bit like my book, if you squint very sideways at it--?

Maybe more than I think. I just happen to associate this song with Jason and Marc and paintball on the one hand, and Firefly on the other, but you know. Sideways squintiness.

You do the combat math, I'm the war artist
You can't take your shots back, I have to watch them miss
The basketball rim shook like a tambourine
not an unlikely event in a game that means nothing
in a game that means nothing
Makeshift we are
lead never leaves your system no matter who you are
Makeshift we are
as makeshift as we are

You're a complex dune, I'm a cloud of octopus ink
You're an elusive tune, I'm more ice sculpture than I think
You're the neutral tribe and I got the wrong openness
Here's where I slowly close my eyes and say, "I'm too drunk for this."
Yea I'm too drunk for this
Makeshift we are
"Weakling Make Trouble" you played on your guitar
Makeshift we are
as makeshift as we are

we are. we are. we are.

the lonliest buoys on dolphin property
you're as quiet as a fish, I only sing for the whole sea
From memory metal tension springs we were gunsmoke and the truth
let's shake some snow off of his shoulders let's shake some snow off of the roof
Let's shake some snow off of the roof
Makeshift we are
occurring to each other under the setup of the stars
Makeshift we are
we imagine us here and here we are
Makeshift we are
through half-squinted eyes becoming a mirage
Makeshift we are

I have the next 4 of 6 working days (plus the weekend) off the dayjob to facilitate the writing (and at one point, a furnace installation), and I've already resorted to posting song lyrics on the internet, which I never do.

Just so we're clear.

Hm. A tag for "rewriting madness," perhaps?

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Mer

Merrie Haskell (it's dot com!)

May 2024

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standing on a star unstable

I am the same, and the same name still I keep.

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30 TV Questions

Sleep is for the weak. Or those without deadlines.

Book Report

My north is your left

Plueah

Five Rules for Commuting to the Underworld

One might draw a peak/valley chart for the non-writing times, too.

Do You Want to Play a Game?

Double rainbow all the way!

Unexpected Writing Day!

Too long for Twitter

"Voice Editing"

Vroom, vroom.

we were gunsmoke and the truth