The publisher of the peer reviewed journal has finally scheduled the article they accepted in 2013 to be published in 2015. The bad news: they sent me the page proofs Friday at 5:00 PM with a note that all corrections must be submitted by Monday morning. Also the email text of the note got the name of the journal wrong, referring to a medical journal. In fairness, I suspect that the editor was sending out page proofs to multiple authors for multiple journals, and the erroneous journal name immediately precedes the right journal name in alphabetical order on the list of academic journals the particular House publishes.

I have been slacking with the writing BADLY because of the whole finding the cat, coordinating the realtor meeting between 5 people's schedules in 2 states, working on a job, finding a new job, finding Dan a new job, deep-cleaning and decluttering the house for sale and daily tasks.

I've got to set some kind of tiny space of time each day when I write: 15 minutes each morning or day or whenever, until life calms down a bit.

Possibly very stupid question, but if my characters are texting each other, how do I format that?

If it's just a couple of lines, you can just use italics or something, but for longer conversations (or lots of them) you could look at some of Lauren Myracle's early books, like TTYL, etc. She uses a lot of texting and textspeak in those, I think.

Thanks, Amy! It ended up being a rather long conversation so I'll look into that. I haven't read that book, but I have heard of it. I doubt I am actually going to complete NaNoWriMo this year, but I have finally made some significant progress on a plot bunny that has been following me around for a while. It's all long hand so far so I have no idea how many words. Also, I'm just writing scenes as they come to me so things are out of order and there is no flow between the scenes right now. Is that strange?

Not at all. Lots of people write as it comes and then put it in order later.

Thanks, Amy.

I almost never do that anymore, but I used to all the time -- a scene would come and I'd write it without knowing where it would go. Most of the building blocks for Pictures of Us were written that way, longhand, on yellow legal tablets, twelve or thirteen years before I actually outlined a plot and sold it.

The only thing I can write that freely anymore is fanfic. Not sure why.

Edited for an important left-out word.

I can't write longhand anymore, the arthritis has gotten too bad.

My hand is in pain a lot with the long hand, but my brain works better that way. Blank Word pages freak my brain out.