Ha. I have finally bulldozed through cleared off one of the two piles of novel edits sitting on my desk. There is a 8.5" square of space at my right elbow now! And the other pile is about five inches tall. Or a hundred pages of edits, take your choice. So the end is in sight!

I've also finally pulled out my seed packets and started starting seeds for this year's garden. Melons and squash and and aubergines and peppers and corn and popcorn, oh my! I still have the tomatoes, flowers, herbs, and root vegetables (which get seeded in place) to go through, but I'm halfway there.

And, all the bricks on the patio from half taking down the double fence have been neatly stacked in the dogrun. (The dogrun for the dog which we don't have. Meh, the house came with it, and until we feel like taking metal posts out of a concrete slab, it's staying where it is. Storage space it is!) Now to start whacking more bricks out of the remaining inner fence, and eventually planting fruit trees along it....

I'm on a cleaning/purging kick at the moment. Have been for a couple days, actually, and I'm hoping it sticks around. I've pulled a pile of stuff I'll never actually use/don't love anymore off my fabric shelves and hope to yank more. Still doubting I can purge enough there to "earn" that $4K Tiara quilting machine, though. I tried quilting on my mother's singer 201 only to find that the FMQ foot that fits my (newly serviced) Babylock doesn't work at all for a vintage Singer. And the foot that does will cost $30+. Thus, I've shifted back to the Babylock for the current quilting project, and just one and a half squares in, am back to dreaming hard about that Tiara, its table, the lovely lovely 18 inches of harp space....

But today I ended up working on my desk instead of sewing. I know it has a surface down there somewhere.... I've gone through a bunch of magazine issues, ripped out the few pages I want to keep, and tossed the rest into recycling. Ditto for swathes of "why do I even have this?" bits of paper. So far the left side of my desk has gone into four stacks: "priority to be dealt with," "books to read," "miscellaneous to be dealt with later," and a box of photos and cards. The right side is still a foot and a half stack of novel edits. I've done twenty pages worth today. If I manage to average ten pages a day... it'll be clear in a month. God that's depressing. My own fault for letting them pile up for so long.

Right now, though, I'm hitting the wall. Time to put the Squiddle to bed, and then find sleep myself. 'Night, all.

I've got a project started of going through the foot or so of reviews from my writing classmates that're stacked on my desk, and condensing down the edits I want to make to my copy of each ten-page section. And a number of the edits are good and thoughtful.

But then there are the sticklers for grammar who keep going "no semi-colons in dialogue!" and I just want to bash their heads in. WHY THE FRACK NOT? Some I take out, but some, I would genuinely speak that way, so I'm leaving them. (I find it hilarious when they circle semicolons with that note about dialogue, without bothering to realize the bit they circled isn't dialogue.) Also bugging me in the category of "slavish adherence to the rules" are the people who swap phrases around so that every single fricking sentence ends on the strong word. (They do this in their own writing too.) And I just look at it and wonder if they've tried reading some of the sentences aloud, because the way they phrased it does not sound right in English.

Of course, there are the classmates who comment that my writing is "smooth like old whiskey," and I just stop and take a moment to savor that. Because my writing has improved, particularly in the last hundred pages of this book, to the point where I'm enjoying each section as I edit it to turn in to class.

Mind, I still have to go revise the first two-thirds of the book to the same par....

I've read through the seventy pages I had, and edited it down to sixty-nine. I have decided that I hate the first scene, possibly the entire first chapter. I can tell that it's not good because I actually hit a point where my brain said, "Finally! The good stuff!" But I don't know how to fix it just yet. The funeral is important, and introducing the seamstress and her son doubly so. So I'll leave it and press on for now.

In unrelated news, one of my cats (Sushi) has gotten some kind of injury on his front right paw. The animal clinic I take him to was closed today, so I'm probably going to take him in first thing in the morning and then keep him with me in the carrier at work. Which he is just going to looooove.

ETA: Not sure exactly where I started, since I didn't check word count before editing, but I have for sure written 653 words today, ending at 14,617. One prompt card has been discarded, as that event is finished, and I'm now staring at a note on one of the others, wondering what I meant by "militia vs. mage stabilization"...

Have finished second editing pass on Queen's Choice!

Now to put on shoes and a hat and go pull weeds.

Non-stop thrills, chills, and excitement around here, y'all. :)

So when we went to Lowe's over the weekend for Wonderful Husband to get a last few things for his class and for me to get four handles for the cabinet (which previously had two handles), we got asked by three sales associates if we needed help.

Tonight, going back to get screws that were actually long enough to put the handles on the cabinet doors, I could not find a one. And when I managed to find the magical "summon sales associate" button, it took forever for her to arrive and she knew nothing about screws.

There's something related to Murphy in that balance, I think....

Eventually I figured out what I needed; the cabinet now has handles. The shower room still looks a wreck, of course, but at least it now has its hardware in place.

Editing tonight leaves me at 563/605 and word count 120,191. Chapter 22 is done and things are starting to get tied up &/or set up for Field of Stars.

Up to page 536/605 and stopping because I don't feel like parsing out Higami's drunken ramblings into non-runon sentences that still give the feeling of drunkenness. Yes, he's been at the wine; the chapter is titled "In Vino, Veritas." And (in different ways and for different reasons) he's not the only one that it applies to. Word count is 120,422.

Didn't edit last night, as I wanted to chat with people online, and I can't multitask creative stuff. Just doesn't work for me, never has, which is why I will never be an author who has playlists for their work.

(That said, I've been working my way through a few CDs during my commute, now that I actually, y'know, have a car with a working CD player again. Today on the drive home I popped in Mike and the Mechanics, and dammit if I wasn't crying in traffic during Silent Running. I have a story I want to write inspired by that song, and I can only hope it hurts other's heart-strings the way it hurts mine. Maybe after editing is done....)

Today's editing closes out at 485/606, and word count 120,826. I'm within a thousand words of my goal! Dealt with aftermath of the titular choice, and got my main four (and Briselied's plus-one) over onto the convent island to find out about the mother they missed out on.

Stopping for tonight at 418/607. Word count 121,280. Have finished chapter 17, gotten to the point of making a few corrections to both the story and my notes file, and most importantly hit the BIG "Wait, what--WTF?!" rugpull/reveal. And it needed almost no editing, so I think I did the scene right.

Wonderful Husband figured out how to fix the fan, and it is now stuck back into/onto the ceiling, giving us light and a gentle breeze once more. We also went out and finally procured curtain rods for the office and two bedrooms. I know what we'll be doing tomorrow and next weekend....

And I edited. Chapter 16 done, which is as good a stopping place as any. Page 382/610, and word count 122,175. 411 words down, and 28 more pages done to boot. Except now I'm looking at that word count and wondering if I'm going to find 2,175 words to cut in the next 128 pages....

Regardless, I now have all my ducks in a row (or eggs in the same basket) and all the primary characters are assembled at King's Castle. And the sugar succubus (aka stalker girl) has finally made her debut.