Sorry about the lack of updates and stuff. I was way sick. What my father would call a man's cold, which is where you are so sick you have to stay in bed and get waited on. A woman's cold is where you are still able to function.
I've managed to get my wife sick. The price of close quarters I guess.
Tomorrow I will hit 20,000 words. I'm so inside this story now that I don't even know if it's any good any more. I like it. I'm enjoying writing it, and if nothing else it will be the first novel I finish. At this milestone the story continues to build and weave. No floundering story lines in sight. We hah!
Sometimes it's a bad day. First some bad news at work. Nothing to do with the "job" part of work. It has to do with the "where" of work. I started this job working in a great environment. Lots of sunlight and surrounded by people who were much fun to work with. A while ago I got moved to a much darker and grayer floor, but I was still surrounded by most the fun people. Now I'm to be moved again to a place that is still further removed from the sunlight and further removed from the fun people. I have nothing against the people I'll be sitting with. They may be just as much fun. Change is stress, good or bad.
Then I was given reason to belive that the literary journal that was to contain my first story in print may not be seeing the light of day. They're not returning my email. It still might happen, but it doesn't look promising.
This is why I write. It's gotten to the point where getting the story published is merely an afterthought. I am just having so much fun with this story. Each new character that makes an appearance becomes more of a joy to explore. They are all doing things I never expected. Character traits roar on to the page with little or no direction from myself. They define themselves as scenes unfold. I like these people.
Back from Terminous. Terminous California that is. Five miles west of Lodi out in the delta swampland. We got some great pictures which I'll be posting soon.
After a long time of having no interest in programming I'm learning three new languages. (AJAX, Ruby, ASP) It's fun to be excited about it again. ASP is for work and not all that interesting but it is proving quite useful. Ruby is this object-oriented scripting language. Nice syntax and there is an extension called Rails that kicks web application butt. And I continue to learn AJAX because it does much cool stuff, and as a bonus it works well with Ruby.
Went to the track in Burlingame. Much fun. I've gotten out of practice. My times were pretty good, but could have been better. I love passing people.
Wrote a long scene today. When I was done I almost deleted it all. The scene, not the story. Then I realized that it wasn't a waste of time. All the stuff I wrote is important. I just need to work it into the story in some other way. That's what rewrites are for after all. I think this is good, because usually I'm too terse if anything.