6 March 2003

Yarg. I had a title last night before I went to sleep, and now I've lost it. It's not that I didn't come up with plenty of titles yesterday, it's that I wanted to keep all of them. It had two or three words, and the letter p was in one of them. (So now you can all tell me what it was, right?) I guess it just goes to show that I should never be more than a few feet from my journal. But I'm not sure that I would have gotten it even then.

Driving me nuts.

As I said, plenty of titles yesterday. Actually, it got to be annoying. I was reading Time and the Gods, and I wanted to just sit and read, but no, not this book, has to keep inspiring titles, so I kept popping up and writing down another one. Some of them sounded more like Karina-titles than like me-titles, but I figure if they don't work for me-stories, I'll change them. So.

If they don't work for me stories, see....

So I stopped reading Time and the Gods when I finished the first section of it, having had title overload for the day, and started reading Caroline Stevermer's A College of Magics, because she was talking about it at World Fantasy Con, and after Lin got me to read River Rats I decided maybe she wasn't entirely bad. And it would be a quick, fluffy fantasy read that would have a continuous plot, which I needed after Time and the Gods. So far it's indeed quick and fluffy, and we'll see if I like it or not, but it's not making an immediate jump to my favorites list.

And. Yesterday I finished Chapter 16. Smackings and whackings. Smashings and bashings. Smitings and bitings. Drinkings and thinkings. No munchings and crunchings, though. Maybe in Chapter 18. Which I will finish today. Which will mean that the rough draft is done. Rah! It's very rough -- there's one point at which someone has one arm in one scene and two arms in the next, and I need to fix that even before I consider the rough draft done -- but it's a kind of rough that can be added to, subtracted from, refined...smoothed, in other words. Polished. Pretty. Novel. Mine.

I could probably have finished it last night, but that would have undone everything Dr. Bill did to my back, so I held on for today, and woke up excited. It's nice to wake up excited about my work.

Steph the Geek had a meme in her journal about how she would spend $1,000,000 if she had to do it in the next month without investing/saving. (She's Canadian, so it'd be easier for her.) And it made me think of how few of the things that are bothering me could be fixed with $1,000,000. Housing would be the big thing, but until we know where we're going, we couldn't know where to get the house. I'm not saying that kind of money wouldn't be nice. I'm not saying I couldn't find projects to do with it. I'm just saying that with all of those projects and purchases, I'd probably still be worrying about many of the same things. (Maybe this should be encouraging somehow, but I'm not sure that it is.)

But I would pressure Michelle to pick out dresses so we could buy them in that month that I had $1,000,000. Because as of last night, I'm going to be a bridesmaid in her wedding (which is going to be in September of '04, we hope). (I'm looking forward to it, and I'm happy because the dresses will likely be black, and black, you will note, is not a pastel.) Mark is going to be a groomsman for Scott; after she asked me, we both passed the phones over. I didn't hear Scott's end of the conversation. What I heard from Mark was: " I will certainly be one of your groomsmen! [pause] I can learn. [pause] Well, I know which end is the pointy one." Ummmm. Yeah. That sort of thing is always encouraging.

Well, I'm going to get going around here so that I can finish up this book. Yay!