Is it that late already?

I know I’m starting this on Tuesday, but I also know I won’t possibly finish it before it appears to have been written on Wednesday.

I am in Phoenix. Tonight through Friday morning.

I am going to head down to Tempe when I wake up and see whether I can get some writing done down there; I’m not doing particularly great so far on my novel… Every day when I check, my sister is ahead of me in word count, and neither of us is up to 3000 words, last I checked. (Note: If one were going to spread all the writing out evenly across the month, one should be through 18,334 words or so by now.) But when I first wrote my novel for last year I did really well in Tempe, and then this year when I was re-writing it, I did pretty well, even after my laptop died. I don’t yet have a replacement laptop (probably sometime next year, if all goes well), but I’ve got plenty of paper to write on.

I don’t know .. I think it has a lot to do with just having a comfortable place to be while I write where there’s basically no schedule to stick to or pressure (real or imagined) to get things done… Where I have big blocks of time (8 to 12 hours or more) that are uninterrupted by “life”. In Pine I don’t have that. If my dad isn’t up and I’m not running the store, I always feel like I need to stop what I’m doing every hour or two to see if my grandparents need anything… and I’m in the middle of so many projects up there … For instance, this afternoon when I was trying to get my things together to come down I kept getting distracted from selecting clothes and making sure I have paper and everything else I need… by Betty. I kept pausing in getting ready to paint a little more on a painting I was in the middle of… and trying to dl the Matrix Revolutions and a player that is compatible with whatever bizarre codec they’ve decided to use to encode this one… which actually takes a fair amount of effort and babysitting over dial-up… And yes, I did get my things together, and I’ve very nearly downloaded two full copies of the player and of each of the two halves of the movie (movies always seem to be broken up in two parts, perhaps to keep the file sizes from being too insane), and I did finish Betty (I’ll get a photo after I get beck to Pine; it was still drying when I left, though signed), so I guess I did okay. But … there are always so many things going on in my room that I rarely get more than a couple hundred words written at a pass before something else distracts me.

When I have long blocks of uninterrupted time, with no other projects pressing and no real responsibilities to try to live up to during that time, I seem to get more done, get more focused on a particular project. So, unless something comes up, I’m going to bus down to Tempe tomorrow and see if I can get some writing done.

Iain, if Marie deposits the money she owes me this week, I can give you the money for the DC. Perhaps we can meet in person while I am in Tempe for an exchange; I may also head that way on Thursday. We shall see. See if you can do those downloads for me, if you haven’t.

I got a pre-order for my novel today! Hooray! That makes one! I also had yet another person who’d said they’d help me out with editing drop clean out of the race. So, assuming that Laura will never finish it (or if she has, will never share her results), perhaps because I’m not good enough for her notes, that leaves me precicely where I was a month ago. I suppose that since I’m trying to write at least one other novel right now though, I’ll stick to that and get on the real, final edit (for typos and obviously confusing sentences) in December. Hopefully we can see a release before the end of the year. Still no word from Cafepress re:perfect bound books. Maybe I’ll call them tomorrow, see if I can get ANY kind of answer. (UPDATE: After about 20 minutes searching in the forums I have an official ETA (that is, it’s not definite, but better than the last 90 days of no news at all) of November 17th for Perfect Bound books via CafePress. We shall have to see how progress goes on my current in-progress novels before I look into offering a ‘final’ version so soon.)

I really want to see Elf. I have been looking forward to it for over a year, now. It looks to be a new “classic” holiday movie. Anyone want to go see it with me?

I am so tired. I am so going to bed. Moo.