the ants go marching two by two, hurrah! hurrah!

2129 words today, for a story-to-date total of 43620. You'll be glad to know that Shann and Taafa are talking to each other again. Mostly yelling, for the record, but at least its communication, right? It beats depressions all to bits.

I've been thinking that I wanted this first draft completed by the end of June, but how badly do I want it? That's nine weeks away, and I'm guessing there's roughly 66K left to go. Anyone want to take bets on how consistently I can produce 1500 words per day, Monday through Thursday for nine weeks? Yeah, me neither. I'd've been a little cockier a couple of weeks ago, but I certainly lost a lot of time in the meanwhile. If that happens again, I'm a goner. (For the record, I *did* know this was the weakest spot in the outline, though...)

Why does it matter? Well, it doesn't, really. No hopeful agent or editor or publisher is waiting with bated breath (baited with what, you might wonder...) for me to submit my masterpiece. At least that I know of! ;) I'm really trying to keep a real schedule, though. If--no, WHEN--I have contracts to fulfill, I'll need to know what is a reasonable time frame for me. I need to know my pacing. And pacing requires consistency. So, there you go.

You may remember in March that I wrote more-or-less straight through Easter weekend at home, and used online word wars to help keep me motivated and on track. The *new* deal is that my bosses (have I mentioned lately how awesome my guys are?) are going to pay for cable internet for me at the store, so hooking up with friends to write online will be a viable opportunity for me during my prime writing time. Will it get too distracting? Not if I limit the people to ones who also are actively looking for words, and limit the random chitchat to specified blocks of time. I'll be taking my computer home for the weekend in order to prepare it for the new modem.

You can laugh here because, although this computer is a Pentium II (which I bought for fifty bucks two years ago), it's been running on Windows 95. The cable company says I need Windows 98 as a minimum, so that's what we're putting on. Why not upgrade higher? I don't want to have to replace my HP810 printer, which got relegated to the shop when our new home computer (XP) refused to play with it last fall, forcing us to buy a new printer. And 98 will run the program fine, AND Yahoo! Messenger. What more could I want? Of course there's more I could want, but I'll save it until this computer dies altogether. It may not be that long, as one counts computer lives.

July is the technical start of the revisions section of the 2 year novel course at Forward Motion. I can start the section a little late if I need to, but I'd rather not. So we'll see how things go, right?