I'd love to, but I don't think this is productivity. This is me, midlife, scraped raw, and the story and the history I've been hiding and repressing because it bloody hurts so much.

So this is bleeding. It happens to be bleeding in the form of what I think is a kickass story, about loyalty and protectiveness and a few other big issues between human beings, but it's still my blood.

I doubt you want to bleed.

If I did, it wouldn't be the first time, but my tap's a little dry...I've just made it on to page 3.Seriously, if I had something better to do, I wouldn't, either.

Just finished Chapter 7. Head-on between Bree and the detective. total: 36,240 words. 177 pages.

Enough for the night.

I doubt you want to bleed.

I've already bled for this one, a bit. And probably will bleed some more along the way. While its connections to my actual life are a bit more tenuous, I've still had to open up a few wounds I didn't know were there to really find Anna's voice.

I'm not opposed to bleeding on GP, mind you; just that this aint a slow drip, it's a fucking Victoria Falls. 36,000 drops of blood in two weeks.

Sorry. I'm a skosh punch-drunk.

I'm proofing a novel in progress that hit it's eighth chapter and 36,000th word yesterday, after 1 week and 5 days. And she took the whole weekend off.

People like you and she amaze me. I only dream of writing that quickly or well.

Speed isn't a prerequisite to a novel - it's just that sometimes it happens that way. I wrote Plainsong in just under six weeks; I took that long just to write down impressions of the South of France and Greece, for And Then Put Out The Light.

You never know.

Oh, I know. It's just frustrating sometimes, for me, because I tend to get novel-length, ambitious ideas combined with short-story-length attention span.

Remember that one super-ambitious Willow/Tara fic I was writing that one time, long ago? You probably don't, though you were very helpful with it. Anyway, yeah. I lost my attention on that one so bad that I think I've deleted it. I went back and tried to look at it the other day and it's poof-gone.

I do remember it, actually.

The whole point about fiction, for me, is having something to say. It isn't necessarily the Grand Issues, although the WIP is: loyalty, and the desire to protect, and how those human traits that very often are defined or assumed to be positives can be extremely negative, and destroy.

I just think, if there's a story, a writer tells it. A fiction writer, anyway.

I just summarized my contest feedback for my online critique group, and realized my low-scoring judge was actually the one who had the nicest things to say about my work. She loved my voice, thought I was brilliant at characterization, praised my ability to weave in historical detail and backstory without slowing the story, etc. She said the story didn't "grab" her, but she apologized for it!

Oy vey.

Of course, I'm probably the exact opposite as a judge. Since I know for a fact I'm more persnickety than most, especially WRT grammar/usage and historical accuracy, I often give a higher score than I think is absolutely warranted because I don't want to be the Hardass Judge from Hell. But then I go ahead and comment on whatever I think needs work, because I figure that's helping them get their book into publishable condition.