I'm so glad you're writing Allyson. Your words should be making their way into the world more often.

And, I'm glad to beta if you aren't overwhelmed with volunteers already.

erika, the reporter in me says: When you've already heard everything improtant that you find out, you've done enough research. But it sounds like you might benefit from settiing a deadline for yourself and sticking to it.

And I, too, have a question: Is it possible to only be capable of writing when you're unhappy?

I wrote all of my short stories, some of which are not-bad, when I was aged 15 to 20 and either single and miserable or living on a different continent from my boyfriend and miserable. Similarly, I wrote almost all of my fic this winter and spring, when I had a job I hated. It seems like when I'm relatively happy, I can't get into a frame of mind where I want to write. Am I just making excuses, or does this jive with anyone else's experience?

Hey, it could happen, but maybe if you make time you can get past it. And hey, your life could turn to crap again...but it's probably not worth it... No, I've got a lot of questions...not sure where to get the answers, either, exactly.(Flashes back to journalism school. ACADEMIC: But I'm not an expert in the field or anything.
ME(pleading): But you're an intelligent person. Of course you have an *opinion*, right?
) Argh.

What are you researching, erika?

So. Lucy is currently entered in two contests that I haven't heard back from yet, but I expect to hear from soon. It is also somewhere in the slush pile of two agents. And I have an unrelated query out to a magazine.

Obsessively checking voicemail every time I return from a brief errand, getting hopeful every time I hear the new message beep for my email, and haunting the mailbox every day starting an hour or so BEFORE the mailman usually shows up is normal behavior, right?

It's what I would do. Normal, OTOH... LJ, I'm trying to get personal accounts about life in nursing homes, also ones where people might have a little $.(Or ok, kind of a lot, maybe $$$$$

Is it possible to only be capable of writing when you're unhappy?

Dude! This is me. My lyrics only come out of me for catharsis. There's like, one happy love song in the whole bunch of them. Fortunately for my creativity (though perhaps not for my blood pressure) I am a) an angry, angry person, so don't often lack subject matter and b) empathetic, so I can write about other people's misery, too!

Other writing, on the other hand, is just fine whenever.

Slipping this one in under the wire. It feels like a cheat, since it's modified from something already written, rather than specifically "written for." But I find if I miss a week due to circumstance, the temptation is to voluntarily skip a week, and that way lies not writing at all. Week 8/16 is also a modified lj entry, but it's there in my own lj, since I missed the deadline in GWW.

Drabble challenge 8/23—"escape" (modified excerpt from an lj entry)

I was dreaming about something pleasant when, as dreams will do, it became an episode of Night Court. Odd, there were no familiar cast members--only an unfamiliar janitor, and the "set" was a public restroom. A woman or young girl had somehow slipped into a pipe and was caught. I don't know whether head-down or not, but suddenly it became imperative to wake up, because if I dreamt anymore I'd discover the trapped person was me. I had to get up, out of bed, because if I fell back asleep I'd dream it again, and it was horribly frightening.

Beverly, thank you for your editor's skills.

You're more than welcome. I have a thing about messing with other people's content, but I line-edit pretty well. Thanks for letting me read it.

You're good. You need to be paid for writing as well as you do.