I'm on vacation Friday, Monday, and Tuesday. The kids will be at their grandparent's Friday evening and part of Saturday. Then they have summer school Monday and Tuesday. I have some big writing time blocks coming up. First I'll need to finish up the gameplay simulator and run data sets though.

I indugled in the time-honored practice of vanity googling for the title of my story with Drollerie Press, "Shepherd to the Wolves," and I found a lovely review of it and the other story that goes with it (as well as the other stories in the anthology).

[link]

I really need to get over the inherent "Don't brag about things that make you giddily happy" thing that my Puritan ancestors have instilled in me.

The reviewer hopes for more stories about the main character, and there's a major development point that should be covered, but I'm getting "I can't possibly come up with something that's as good as the previous work seems to be" in my head, never mind that I apparently was able to do it before.

I assume other creative fields are plagued with this kind of writerly self-consciousness, but damn this is painful.

twitches

Guess what? It's a week until the book is released.

twitches some more.

Thank goodness for the timing of the F2F. Distraction yay!

Um, Connie, did you mean "vanity publishing" or did you mean "vanity googling"?

She's one of my favorite reviewers.

I managed to finish Chapter 21 and Chapter 22. That puts me at 128k words. The end of the rough draft looms ever closer.

I meant vanity googling. I claim extensive exhaustion due to Week 3 of a massive update that our customers are going through on short notice and which our managers are using to justify having so many people on the job when things are slow (in order to counter demands that they hire more people for hell months like this one)

Gud, that's awesome! Go, go, go!

I wrote the first four pages of a new project yesterday! Which ... doesn't seem as impressive, but is totally a start.

Aside from just lots of stuff happening as the end nears, it's just plain fun to start having things finally go full circle. This thing in chapter one plays a role in chapter 24. So does this other thing in chapter two.

Go Gud!

Go Amy!

I have met new agent in person and she TOTALLY rocks. She gets it-- she completely gets everything about my writing.

I feel like a thousand pound weight labeled "You suck, don't ever write anything again," has been lifted from my shoulders.

That's super fantastic, Barb!