Haven't been posting as much recently for a few reasons. Part of it is weather; last week we had a brutal heat wave that renewed my vows to never move to Riverside, Las Vegas, or Texas. I am a delicate coastal flower or something like that. Another part is us having company! Wonderful Husband's friend Neil flew in Thursday for a Saturday wedding (at the Wayfarer's Chapel) and stayed with us until he flew out again on Monday. Spending time with him was a lot of fun. And a third reason I haven't been posting is that I've been taking my "Sew Something September" challenge moderately seriously and sewing most evenings. I've been doing a set of six green quilt blocks each week, and working steadily on finishing my medieval outfit before I tackle any new project.

Among other things I have been doing is working on the Singer 15-88 sewing machine, of course. I've discovered that polishing metal has certain things in common with smoothing spackle. As in, there's a limit to how much I can do each evening before I hit the point of index finger blisters. It's amazing how much black comes up on the cloth from something that looks shiny silver! Still, each round of polishing gets me that much closer to it looking almost-new. If I get home in time for sunlight this evening, I'll post some progress pictures.

After a summer off, my novel writing class starts up again tomorrow night. I haven't prepped and printed an entry because I hate what the next section of Queen's Choice is like and need to have at it with a broadsword. At least I was able to break through my block on flybystardancer's request for a ficlet set one month after Electronic Coupling. That was hard because I could not find anything further to say about the PxJ in that 'verse, so I ended up falling back and punting using another character.

Wonderful Husband and I have begun drafting plans for a road trip up through Oregon and Washington sometime in the next year or two. It'll be tricky to time it because I get two weeks' vacation a year and the majority of that is spent in England, with the rest slated to various conventions. (Yeah, yeah, first world problems.) So we'll see when it ends up happening....

For the first time in a while, Wonderful Husband and I have resumed taking classes. Specifically a dance class for the both of us Friday nights, and for me a writing class Wednesday nights. The latter met for the first time yesterday, and I think I'm rather going to enjoy it. It's going to be much more of a feedback/con-crit circle than an actual class, and from what we did last night I think it's very much going to help me.

Getting home from the class, I opened the file on my novel which has been sitting untouched for too long. Out of curiosity I pulled up the stats. Eighty thousand words! And out of double curiosity I pulled up the websites of a few publishers of the genre. One calls for 100K-130K words, but two others just say 80K+. O.O;; I thought I was much further off than that! Of course I still need to finish the thing and then edit/polish the heck out of it, but I have most of a finished novel sitting on my hard drive. So I've been spending part of this evening poking at the first chapter and trying to figure out what I can do to fix the crappy first five pages... which will be the ten (double-spaced, in a larger, broader font) that I will probably turn in to the class next week. Currently my thought for "how to fix this" is "delete most of it." May end up going with that.

Went to Borders and got a copy of Transformers: The Score. I love Borders. The staff there actually want to help me find the things I'd like to buy. They also send me nice coupons and see me glancing at manga series on the shelf and say things like "Oh, are you looking for the newest volume? It's on the endcap."

I also discovered a small costume museum on the second floor of the South Coast Plaza Annex. I only had time to dart through it, but the display will be there until the end of the month so I must return with digicam and notepad.

I won an argument with a story as to its format ("you will be short and not long because otherwise I will not write you") and thus started in on the October challenge for the prowlxjazz comm. Why are we all ending up doing prompt #3 first? But I also got nudgings on what I think are #1 and #4. I have informed them that they, too, will be short.

I also had some things start coming together for the next piece in the Ghost Stories series. Topics of research have included Stunticons, ghost trains, and James Dean's fatal crash, among others.

I went to dance class, where Wonderful Husband and I tango'd, revisited the foxtrot, and samba'd our little brains out. We got a new step in samba this week, one which we agree makes the dance much more fun and much more interesting to us.

And I quit lollygagging around and wrote more on The Novel. Not much to be sure (only 199 words), but the point is I wrote. And tomorrow I will write more. But for now, I am going to shower the sweat out of my hair and off my body, and then go to bed in something resembling a timely fashion.