I pace the hallways, back and forth, my dress shoes scuffing the tiled school floor. Rehearse the words I know so well, the phrases I wrote to interest, to impress.

The student before me leaves the room, relieved to be done but annoyed at his gaffs.

A sneak peek in the window, to look at the judges, judging my predecessor as they will judge me.

I shiver. I moan. I wait.

The door opens, "We're ready when you are," and the butterfies in my stomach threaten to escape out my mouth as I smile, shake hands, and prepare to speak.

I just got my first form rejection letter (from an agent). It hurts a lot more than the personalized kind.

Aww, Susan. Sorry to hear it.

t melodramatic temper tantrum

When will anyone recognize MY GENIUS??? WHEN??? WHEN???

A form letter to ME? Don't they know who I am....er...who I will be some day, as soon as the world recognizes MY GENIUS?

t /melodrama

They will all kneel and beg to kiss your pinky ring one day.

In other news, I've insent you, wrt:freelance work from months and months ago. Sorry for being totally off the ball!

Thanks, Liese! I'll look over what you sent and get back to you--probably not tonight, because I'm coordinating a wedding tomorrow and am scrambling to do all the chores I normally do on Saturday, but tomorrow evening or Sunday at the latest.

Yup, no problem. I don't expect even a freelancer to put in weekend hours just for me! (Although I clearly still am, because I took a nap this afternoon when I shoulda been working. Ah, the benefits of self-employment.)

Actually, a lot of my work happens evenings and weekends, because I can hand Annabel to DH and say, "Job to finish--she's your daughter for now." But most of today and tomorrow are going to the wedding I'm coordinating. I think I'll like the work by my next wedding or the wedding after (I do 4-6 a year, taking turns with the church's other coordinators). But for this one I'm nervous, since it's both the first one I've done completely solo and a fairly complex one.

Aw, Susan, seconding your rejection emotion, except mine might come with a promise to Quit Once And For All, which in my more together moments I imagine my muse looking down and saying "Excuse the fuck out of *me*, Virginia Woolf." Because my muse shares my weakness for profanity, I think."If you're so sure nobody'll care, why the Announcement?"

Well, I'd probably be more down were I not on the edge of a writer high over the current novel.

Speaking of which, I've reached a Plotting Impasse, and y'all are great help with those. Basically, I need my protagonists, Jack and Anna, to do something that's very much against the rules of their time so I can get them alone together for long enough to form a Passionate Bond. The rule-breaking is non-negotiable. But since I care about historical accuracy, I want to make it as plausible as possible.

Here's the situation: July 1811, Spain, Peninsular War. A small group of British soldiers and noncombatants (a wagon convoy of wounded being sent away from the front) is captured by a French regiment that, conveniently for my plot, shows up where no one expected them to be. Thanks to a plot device in the form of a French bullet, the young lieutenant in command of the British soldiers guarding the convoy lies unconscious, so Jack, a sergeant, is the highest-ranking Englishman aside from a pair of surgeons. Thanks to another convenient bullet, Anna is the only surviving lady of the group, though there are two other women--a private's wife and a camp follower who cohabits with one of the corporals.

The commanding French officer is capital-E Evil, and intends to rape Anna. It'd take too long to go into here, but he's figured out a way to sufficiently isolate her from the other British prisoners that he could pull this off. Fortunately, a junior French officer suspects his design and decides to help Anna escape. And since he can hardly send her off alone to make her way back to the main body of the British army, he'll also help a British soldier escape to guide her. Which, of course, to make the plot work has to be Jack.

I think I can justify sending her off with just Jack on the grounds that the good French officer would feel it was too risky for him to help more than two people escape. What I'm having a little trouble with is making him seem like the best possible choice of all the available Brits. The surgeons are out because they're needed to care for the wounded, so that's easy. And a certain number of the soldiers were wounded in the battle, and a good many of the others, given the realities of Wellington's army, wouldn't be the kind of men you'd trust alone with a woman. But I'm still stuck with the problem that there's bound to be someone who'd be less cause for compromise to Anna's reputation--someone married, middle-aged, and homely, for example--than our single, 28-year-old hero who looks a bit like Nathan Fillion and looks just as good in tight pants.

The one idea I've had is to involve a third person in the escape, but to kill them in the early going, leaving Jack and Anna alone. Neither of the other women would work--one because she has a baby to care for, the other because I need her later in the story and can't kill her off. So I could use one of the disposable men, except that A) I've already killed so many people in this story I feel like I should change my name to Tim Minear, and B) I'm not sure that going off with two men would really be seen as any improvement reputation-wise over going off with just the one.

Thoughts?