The Adventures of Sheila the Wonderbink

Okay, I'll just say that John Barrow lost the runoff and I am pissed (and worried), but I've done all I can.

Meanwhile, in the rest of my life . . .

I made it through National Novel Writing Month with most of my sanity intact. I hit 50,000 before November 30, and I ended on a reasonably graceful cliffhanger at the 54,527 word mark. I probably could have gotten farther ahead had (a) my part-time job not suddenly decided that I needed full-time hours, in the form of brain-meltingly long (nine or ten hour) shifts and (b) I'd not gotten involved with a fellow I met through one of my writers' groups, who shall be hereinafter referred to as the Gentleman Caller.

The novel is still incomplete--I had a detailed outline that I worked on over the past year and I cut things off about two-thirds of the way through it. My plan is to work on it as a leisure activity over the next few months and then toss it in the same trunk that all my NaNoWriMo efforts go. I'll be shifting most of my writerly focus back to The Two Kinds of Magic, an urban fantasy novel I've been working on for more years than I want to calculate. I found a terrific writers' group that specializes in genre fiction (science fiction, fantasy and horror, specifically) and it's been great to get insight from people who can grasp where I'm coming from. It's also more thorough feedback, because people are going from written submissions instead of (as in other groups I've been in) read aloud.

I was talking to the Gentleman Caller about Mod Boy the other night, and I did the math and realized that it had been years since I'd seen Mod Boy. So I sent him an email asking how he was. Keep in mind, that emailing him is like (and I have told him as much) dropping a stone down a deep well and waiting for the splash. (He agreed with me!) Because of that, I was genuinely startled to find an email back from him the next day. He caught me up a little on what he's been up to--he's going to be a father again soon and he's working on another book. (Did I mention that he wrote a book? One that he was working on when I met him? Did I mention that this was one of the big reasons I fell for him like a thing dropped from a great height? Yeah. Anyway. Consider it mentioned.) He said he was well and wished me the same. I wrote him back to tell him about my NaNoWriMo victory and to congratulate him on his impending fatherhood. I didn't leave a single question or conversational hook to try and drag him back with, I just sent it out and let it go.

If you're new here, check out the "mod boy" tag on this journal. It will fill you in on what a big step that is.

I'm still slugging it out at the Big Green Grocery Store and I'm doing another project for Standardized Testing People. I'm working on acquiring a new workplace to give a weird name to, preferably with full-time hours, benefits and a generous salary, so I can pay my own mortgage without parental help.

The Ten Thousand Flowers Project continues steadily. I set it aside for NaNoWriMo, but now that that's over now, I plan to resume at my two-flower-a-day pace.

I think that's about it for now. See you in three months.

Let it be known to all and sundry that I have finally have a complete draft of a novel with the tentative title of The Two Kinds of Magic. Let there be much rejoicing!

(And after that, let there be much revision, but let me enjoy my little victories for now.)

Today I took pleasure in filling in the one last gap in the manuscript.

Today I learned that the self-service kiosk at my post office stops being self-service on tax deadline day.

There's not much May left, is there? I'd better get my crap together before June hits.

The first weekend in June is officially booked with my latest niece's baptism on Saturday and Rock and Roll Monster Bash on Sunday. (For those of you on my list asking "do WHAT?" about the first item--yes, I'm an auntie again to Miss Isabelle Grace O'Shea, the second daughter of my younger brother, Patrick, and his lovely wife Carrie.) Both events should provide quite the contrast to each other.

The following weekend, I will be hosting the 21st Anniversary of my 21st birthday in the usual style. Unfortunately, pulling the plug on Facebook as abruptly as I did has left me occasionally scrambling for contact information I thought I had. The past few weekends of shows (I have a job! I can afford cover charges again!) have seen me pulling people aside to extract email addresses from them. Only one has bounced back so far and it was kind of a long shot anyway.

The next two weekends, I'll be in Italy on a family trip. The last three days of it will be spent hurled in the general direction of Venice before I fly out. I'm trying to coordinate a meet up with freecloud13 at some point, because it would be a darn shame to go all the way there and not see her after so many years of knowing her.

The last day of June has already pretty much been written off as recovery time.

Meanwhile, I have work to do at the law firm. Boy howdy, do I have work to do. I'm making an effort to pace myself, keep stress to a minimum and do the best I can with what I have and what I know. As precarious as life as a temp is, it comes with certain advantages, and one of those advantages is the ability to say, "Sure, I can work overtime, but you know it's gonna cost you, right?"

I'm poking along at a romance novel and I need to restructure the way I work on it since I decided that using the MARTA commute to get work done, while surprisingly productive, was too much strain on me to be worth it. They let me park for free at the office and I can get there faster in my own car, so I did that for a week and I may never go back to MARTA to get to this job unless my car can't get me there for whatever reason.

The only thing I want to say about Mod Boy right now is that I sent him an invite to the birthday party. We'll see if he shows. (It's a long damn drive from where he lives, so I'm not hanging too heavy a coat on that hook. Low expectations, high hopes, as azewewish would say.)

Today I took pleasure in plucking cherry tomatoes from one of my patio plants first thing in the morning.

Today I learned a few more nifty things about how to fill out immigration forms.