WL: I has a sad. And it occurred to me that there’s a curve. The first time is painful. Then it gets easier, until you’re almost laughing about it. But then… you poke the same bruise one time too many, and suddenly it’s not funny anymore. I have One Last Ditch Effort up my sleeve, but at the moment, that just seems like drawing a bullseye on said bruise and inviting another poke. I’ll probably do it anyway because I couldn’t live with the “if only I’d tried it” factor, but I don’t have the heart for it at the moment. (It’s a pulpy mess on the floor. Awaiting transplant.)

NB: First two of seven “chapters” fleshed out. I really believed I would have it finished by today, but Day Job was very hostile toward the writing schedule this week. Still plenty of wiggle room with the word count. Hopefully done by next weekend. Done done, as in subbed. There’s the benefit of writing short: not a huge, heartbreaking investment of time and energy.

Blog: Wrote June 20 column for RTB (yes, June 20—I’m still a neurotic wreck about “guest appearances,” and the sooner I get them turned in, the less my sanity deteriorates). The gals’ POV from the Hero Matchmaker thing, and definitive proof that writers are evil. Now it’s official—you couldn’t pay me enough to be a romance novel heroine. If I’m on the schedule after that (heh), I’ll buckle down and do something slightly less fruity.

NB: Thursday, I think, got a wild notion to write something short (me, Ms. But-It’s-Only-40,000-Words-Over-Maximum-Length) for a specific market. It’s falling together pretty nicely. Don’t exactly have the ending. Didn’t have character names until I hit the wall with the ending and went back to fill in all those blanks. Finally came up with appropriate benign-sounding acronym for the evil group, prior to which it was my standard TAO (The Acronym Organization). None of which sounds like “falling together pretty nicely,” but trust me, it’s much smoother than most of my starts.

Stands at 7300 words (in 3 days—whee!) with my lack of ending and first-draft placeholders (such as “insert face sucking here”—seriously, this is my process), so hitting minimum length won’t be a problem, and I’ll have plenty of room to flesh it out before I hit maximum.

No suitable title yet. About 50 campy titles, at which I seem to excel. Unfortunately, not real fitting for my torture stories.

Don’t know how well suited it is for said market (primarily, don’t think my hero is enough of an asshole), but I suppose they’ll let me know. If they let me NO, I reckon we found our serial, since I’m of a mind the yield on a story this size is too low to expend a huge amount of effort finding it a home.

(Completely-unrelated-to-anything vampire story, by the way. Practicing stepping outside the universe upon which Kerry’s Fantasy Career was based.)

IIWS: Worked peeling off a scab into a loooooove scene. Yeah, baby, take it off… that’s right. I assume that bit will be universally ill received, but I needed blood and the man wouldn’t bite. Desperate times call for disgusting measures.

SC: Heroine killed Baddie #1. Messily. Heroine really shouldn’t have been wearing white.

Blog: Planned to compile a Pantser-to-English dictionary but decided there wasn’t much point, since every single definition was “I haven’t got a frickin’ clue, but it’ll be awesome when I figure it out.”

WL: Dang it, where did I put that thread? I lost it in Chapter Six…

No, not done with revisions I wanted done on the 16th, and I can’t blame it entirely on Crisis Core (damn you, Squeenix!). I’ve been living with this book so long, I can recite it verbatim. I’m at the “Gah, not you again” point. A break might help, but I don’t have that luxury. If a GH judge asks for a full, I have a day to get a revised full (which would be a good idea—a lot has changed since the October 2007 version) to RWA, and there’s only so much I can fix in a day. I don’t know when or if that day will come, but I don’t want to arrive there and kick myself because I wasted the 3 days or 4 weeks or 2 months in which I could have made this a priority. (insert cranky little kid whine here)

In a cosmic warning to put nose to grindstone or else, the PSP had an encounter with the tile floor. After much  hyperventilating, it was determined all of the detached pieces were, in fact, detachable by design and no permanent damage was done. (I am duly impressed by the PSP’s sturdiness, if not its button and light placement. I mean, seriously, the low battery indicator is hidden under your thumb, so really the first indication of battery lowness is the screen going black in the middle of a boss fight, which is teh suck.) Also, I accidentally overwrote Angelic Daughter’s game, and she was justifiably livid, so… Point taken, cosmic watchdog. No more playtime for mommy for a while.

At least I finally know why Seph went batshit crazy. Poor baby. I could have comforted him. I had a box of tissues in my inventory…