I should have copied mine. I may have done, but if so it's gotten lost. I know! It's probably in the big envelope with the extra copies. Now where the hell is that envelope?

Deb, glad to. Still up, DH not home yet.

Susan, many congratulations!

OK, my brain is draining. Bev, did I or did I not send you the corrections to the church registers bit? Willow got sick and all my attention got siphoned off to that.

No, dear. Let me check your last to me, and I'll email you.

Just sent you stuff. Check your email. Bits and pieces, corrections to Chapt 7 and the beginning of Chap 8.

Woohoo!

t does end zone dance

For the first time in over two weeks, I actually made my writing quota for the day! I've still got it! I may be delayed a few weeks, but I'm really truly going to finish this novel in spite of it all!

• catching-up about 300 odd posts*

whew. It sure has been a long summer. Anyway, I wanted to thank you again Deb G for editing those haikus for me. You're such a wonderful editor. It turned out the magazine that enlisted me to do them ousted them in favour of a vegan cake recipe instead, which kind of hurt, but I wrote them more to engage my bad poetic self than anything.

Actually, I am posting for some advice as well. From whoever cares to give it, really. I bumped into a friend from university (we took a creative writing class together) and it turns out he's the new news editor for the university's student paper. Anyway, he's getting married and begged me to take a few article assignments since he looks like a anal control freak because he has been writing all the articles(summer contributer slump) for the news section for the past few weeks. He's nice and I really respect him but article writing makes me crazy. After my first attempt he sent me this ten page article writing guide to presumably teach ignorant me about inverted pyramid style, so I fixed the article the way he wanted it, but it's making me feel embarassed to have my name attached to it. It's such a different mode of writing than I am used to. I sort of feel like I am "square peg round holing" my way through and I am a little worried I'll lose credibility in the university writing community (I have published in the U of W creative writing journal) if people come to associate me with these horrid articles. Fromt the friend perspective.. I don't want to bail and let him down in his time of need because he was always very helpful to me with editing and so on. Thoughts?

Brynn, that smells like a no-win situation to me, honestly. If you hate doing it and don't have any interest in it, it seems likely you'd be damaging him more than helping by producing stuff neither of you were really satisfied with. But that's just my take, and I could be way off base here.

Stupid frellin' magazine with their vegan cake recipe, anyway.

Brynn, do you think you could explain to him in a non-confrontational way why you want a pseudonym on any future articles you might write for him? (Although, I doubt it would surprise all that many people in the academic writing community that you got rewritten by the editor. :-))

Maybe you could ask that you be assigned the pieces that allow for greater creativity instead of the straight news pieces. Do some features first and then work up to some news features then do some straight news.

I liked the challenge of flipping back and forth from feature to straight news to editorial. But, if your heart's really in telling a story and not researching and informing, features will be much more comfortable to you.