Yay! It's Friday again :)

Yesterday I saw another little mouse running around at the store, and we did not manage to lure him into the trap overnight. Now he's got a whole weekend again to be tempted by it. He's been pretty quiet most of today, for which I am truly thankful. I know. It's pretty sad when the mouse score is the headline news item of the day.

Words on *False Perceptions* have been low these two days, but they have existed. I'm struggling massively with not even liking the story right now. The words are not coming easily, even with the outline to point me in the right direction. I can only hope it gets easier again once I'm through this section; if not, I'll be doing battle with myself each and every day to even open the file. But I will. Most days, anyway.

There is no job in the world that is nothing but joyous fun, every hour of every day. (If you have such a job, I DO NOT WANT to hear about it, thank you very much.) Whether I have chosen writing or writing has chosen me or God has chosen to plop writing and me together, I am not certain most days. But it's where I'm at, and I'm not giving up, especially not in the midst of a project. I may need to read this again on Monday, to remind me!

This afternoon I finally downloaded Keynote (a freeware tree-style organizational tool) as RuthAnne recommended back in...November? Whereas Ruth apparently thrives on figuring out new programs, I am still trying to determine what really makes it better than QuickPlot, which I've been using for over a year now. SHE says Keynote can run circles around QuickPlot, but maybe I'm too near-sighted to watch the race. I don't know. You'll be getting a *help* email, Ruth!

I chose this particular time to download it because I am just barely starting to amass enough information on the *Shann* project to need to organize it, so if I'm switching programs, this seems to be a good time. I already have *False Perceptions* and *Heaven can Wait* all laid out in QuickPlot, and see no need to transfer them over. (Once I've finished writing them, I won't be accessing the info nearly as often.)

Other than spending a couple of hours messing with Keynote, the only real progress I've made is finalizing my secondary language group to Black African. This language family consists of many African tongues spoken south of the Sahara and west of Ethiopia and the Sudan. Again, I'm not taking the language straight; I'm tweaking the feel of it for my own purposes. The big news is that the name of my female main character, a woman from this enemy country, is Taafah.

I'm seeing plenty of scope for conflict between Shann and Taafah and their respective cultures, and will be entertaining myself with seeing how many layers of conflict I can weave into this story in this pre-writing stage. Why is planning a story always so much more fun than writing it? Enquiring minds want to know.