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.

My ego would also like to thank you.

I have a thing about messing with other people's content, but I line-edit pretty well.

I'm the opposite. I can suggest restructuring or reworking but I suck at the details.

I suppose that's why I am forever finding typos in my own work months after the fact.

Nah, Kristen, I'm way better at editing other people's stuff -- my own, I know what it's supposed to say, so in my head, it does!

Hi all. Just bopping in to pimp a friend's book:

Barbara DeMarco Barrett--an old, dear friend of mine and the person who knows more about writing than anyone else I know, and let's face it, I know a lot of people--finally has her book on writing out, "Pen on Fire."

Everyone knows I sniff at writing books, but Barbara's the real deal. Visit her Web site.

End of commercial announcement.