The Side Effects of Snow Days and other stories

Today, I am grateful for this:

Meaning the snow, though I like the yard, too.

...as it cancelled nearly all of my normal errands and meetings and events this week. Which allowed me to sit down on the couch with blanket and computer and sometimes cat on my lap, and push out the last thirteen thousand words of my second full-length novel.

This story has been blood and tears, mental exhaustion, uncertainty, the setting aside of over fifty thousand lifeless words and starting over, and the general writerly idea—nascent to the efforts of the long hard middle pages—that I Suck At This. But it has a beginning, a middle and an end now, and though I'm still scrubbing up bits of the final chapter before I dare show it to alpha readers, I'm relieved at having my red-faced, wrinkled, but whole little baby in my arms.

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According to Maia, we built the bookshelves for this purpose:

Everything belongs to the cat.

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Writers' link of the week: I loved this post by Sean Ferrell on the Writer who never shows up.

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Music of the week: This band may be as famous as all get-out, but I never heard of them till I saw this video and OH MY WORD.



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Random amusement of the week: Not only am I rather delighted to discover a site called Geeks are Sexy, I thoroughly enjoyed this comparison chart for Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings.

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I think it may be sleeting.

And though I've written the first word and the last and everything in between, I can't help longing to get back to making little polishes on that last chapter. Of course, I also have a house to clean, and it's getting dark, which means it will be hard to sweep the floor... the days are never long enough when I'm in full writing mode. But then, I never get bored, either.

Happy weekend!