This year, the competition is specifically looking for a crime writer.

They might as well have said, "This year, the winner is Erika."

I've decided not to stop worrying about it exactly, but to limit my worry to whether or not I should continue trying to sell Lucy once I've finished this edit or concentrate all my energies on writing Anna and trying to sell it once it's done. I'm glad I'm doing this rewrite. If nothing else, it's strengthened my sense of Anna's background and issues for her story. But maybe I'm being too pigheaded in my desire to sell my very first novel, just because other people have been known to do it. It's not like it's the only or even a particularly important marker of talent or career success.

Aw, shucks, Polter-Cow. Thank you. It does have a certain inevitability about it, doesn't it? But the damn thing just won't write itself. Stupid novel, making me work! "I bought a screenwriting program...I thought it would do a lot of it."
Christopher Moltisanti The Sopranos

You guys aren't gonna start doing this to me, are you? "Oh, that book was disgusting. Bloody and smutty and violent. I thought of you."

Kind of unrelated, but my former CW prof (Miriam Toews A Complicated Kindness just won the Canadian Governour General's Award for fiction. I'm feeling so damned proud.

Also, I've got a completed series of dialogues that a friend wants to me to adapt to be a film short... Wondering if anyone has experience with this sort of adaptation and/or wouldn't mind opining whether or not they can even see them working in this way? (no rush)

Just a quick thanks to betas who have gotten back to me on the teaching essay. I'm sorry if I haven't replied individually to your comments yet; just got home last night and am working today. I have the rest of this week off, so I'll be getting back to you soon.

It sounds like, despite minor suggestions with some wording, you all mostly seemed to think it was publishable. Woot! Thanks! I'll start pursuing that angle next week.

Kristin, I have it, but I'm frelled: I'm posting at Kinko's, because our router died, and I can't access my email at home until Nic installs the new router (plase heaven, sometime today).

I realized I just posted this without identifying it as part of Tep's Challenge.

When I hear time is relative, this is what I think: Lunch with your friend is like a blink, easy and short. Waiting for a bus that doesn’t arrive can make your life pass before your eyes. Telling someone you like them ‘that way’ takes six years, especially when you think they think you’re a freak. Every rejection letter takes really long to read because of the index of your artistic failings written in the form letter in invisible ink that you have to decode before you can gnash your teeth over them. It’s like the first time, every time. Sometimes I’m thirteen. Sometimes I’m forty, and have lived really hard. A good day of writing lives outside time, like a good kiss. A bad day of writing is solitary confinement. Any amount of time is too long to have a meeting about what’s wrong with me.(I have felt that I died in some of them, to be reincarnated as somebody who doesn’t give a shit about “optimizing” anything. It’s a miracle.) Time really doesn’t care if you want to be in it or not. One hour of Buffy or Homicide=five minutes. One hour of Crossfire: 1 hard depressing week.

No worries, Deb. Take your time.

Actually, Kristin, insent.

I go shower now.

erika, by the way, you just killed me with that piece. It's very clean and pure, and unbelievably crisp.

Thanks. Funny, because I didn't write it looking for a response...just to prime the pump.