Three-Day Novel contest, first and last

10,839. I got to a late start, when I turned my computer on at 11:45 last night only to discover the hard drive was toast. Luckily I'd had signs of this and backed up my files on a CD just the night before, so I'm not concerned except for the fifty bucks or so it'll take to replace it (also that I forgot to save my custom dictionaries in Word, but that's not irreplaceable anyway, just convenient). I started this morning on one of Eric's old hard drives, on a computer he'd planned to take to school, and tooled merrily along until I realized that the portion of the story I'd decided to write was (a) coming out total crap and (b) way too short. I finished what I outlined just now, at just over 10K. I could go back and fill in, but I'm feeling discouraged by what I'm feeling are generally poor writing skills. I think I'm going to leave this as is and work on Shoelace tomorrow, but also get in other things, like spending time with Eric when he's not working on school stuff.

Maybe I'll do better another year. I'm terribly out of shape, writing-wise, I think.

If I didn't have to go to work, I'd have plenty of time.

Gah. I'm panicking about the outline and feeling like I've gotten nothing done tonight. Which is basically true (except for picking tomatoes and taking a walk--oh, and finishing a skein, so I guess it's basically not true), since I haven't posted at M&M when I'm supposed to and I haven't finished the story outline and I haven't done the canning I meant to and so on. It's that time of month and I'm feeling yucky, so that's an excuse; and work has been hectic lately and the one task I really enjoy is causing me problems, so that's another. Ugh. Mainly, I'm just feeling off. Also, Eric told me last night that PV is lousy (I mean, he didn't say that; I gathered it from what he did say) and I don't want to have to practice this much at the rate at which I write because I'll be eighty-seven by the time I can do anything good. Tomorrow I'll carve out time to finish the outline--I'd better!--and can and post, and Friday I'll stay away from the computer until midnight, and then I'll see what I can do.

A long time ago

Jesus. I just went to look at my last Three-Day and it's from 2003. Has it seriously been five years since I did this? (I never used to use 'Jesus' as an epithet until I wrote this particular story, incidentally.) What have I been doing all this time? I mean, living, I guess--2003 was when Eric got married for the first time, and all of 2004 was lousy, and then in 2005 I was long-distance dating and getting tired of my job, and 2006 was adjusting to life in Toledo and wedding planning, and 2007 was being married. So I had no time to write in there? Bah. I mean, I know what happened, I did what I'm doing now, other things that are easier and fill up my time more quickly. Five years.

I'm stuck on Shoelace, too. And it feels fragile and lousy. But maybe that's because I got stuck on the scene and then stopped working on it. I still want to finish it by the end of the year (unless I end up starting over, and if I do I may shelve it entirely for a while). I want to finish things. I don't want to look around in another five years, another fifteen, another thirty, and wonder why these things aren't done.

However, it's still past bedtime now. I have a free lunch hour tomorrow and no book to bring. I'll put it to good use.

Novelty

I have a little less than four weeks to get this year's Three-Day Novel outline together. It's a story idea I've had for, I note with some distress, three years (why the distress? I have other ideas that are older that I'm still hanging onto) and I most likely won't ever write it unless I do it as a Three-Day. However, I suspect it's too big a story to fit into forty thousand words, so I'm not sure how I'm going to work this. Eliminate one character's perspective? Eliminate one of the plot elements? Write in first person to force some limitations? Simply aim to get halfway? I don't think that's a good idea. I could do it in diary form, like the last one. There's a way to do this, I'm sure.

In other news, I continue to be amazed at how freely women discuss the various aspects of reproduction. Perhaps my workplace is a little freer than usual because we seem to get frequent large groups of pregnant women, but still, I had no idea that women walked around talking about these things so much. I guess as women it's a fairly important part of our lives, biologically speaking, but I kind of figured the cultural disapproval of speaking of such things carried over from childhood to adulthood. Not so, it seems.