Failures and successes

 I'll let you figure out which is which...

At the mid-point of the challenge, it looks like I am officially not going to make the NaNoWriMo wordcount deadline. As a learning experience, this was an interesting one. Meaning, I learned that novel-length writing may not, as it turns out, be my forte. Unless I have a lot of time. And the other thing is that I am a very self-critical editor. I keep taking things out, instead of adding in filler. I will fill in some mythos background and I have some more scenes to flesh out, but if this thing makes it to 25K I'll be surprised. Is that novella length? Or maybe I could pare it down to a longish short story. The WriMo exercise isn't really meant for publishing without some serious polish, but I want to at least be able to share it with a handful of people to see what they say about it. Meanwhile, I have a story spinning itself together in my head...part of it is true, and happened (and at least one person will recognize the central "figure" in said story...), and part of it is entirely fanasty (not a very nice one, though). I need to get it on paper before I lose it entirely.

I read a novel in one sitting yesterday. It felt great. I wish I could do that a little more often, sometimes, just lose myself so completely in a book that I can't put it down. I have to say, all of the praise I've read for this particular series is well deserved (no, it's not anything to do with mopey teens and sparkly vampire ennui).

I was surprised to get an acknowledgement card from an institution that I contacted last week. That's at least a little encouraging. The net may be expanded to include Connecticut, although I'm not sure, since that is eight hours away from where I ideally originally wanted to be located, and I don't know much about that area...not to mention the timing of all of this is not the greatest. (Hi winter in the Northeast!) But you go where the opportunities are, right? (In this case, Yale. Yes. Ivy League. Can this really be an option? I'm still mulling it over, but it's entirely within the realm of possibility.)

Dealt with a sick kid over the weekend, which wasn't fun (for him, especially). At least whatever bug he had burned through his system fairly quickly. Its effects linger, but the worst part seems fairly brief. Hopefully no one else catches that crud...

I just want this week to be over, desperately. Ugh.