I love this window seat. It’s a great place to curl up with books or even with a laptop (I had outlets put on each side for when the battery runs down), and Lucy and Wolfie love it (Bernie calls dibs on the pillows under the desks). But none of us have [...]

I know, the floor’s not done. But I want my desk back. The last time Mollie was here, she took everything on the desk and put it in a box and shoved the box on the window seat so she could work. The box is still somewhere on the window seat, buried, [...]

I tried to start cleaning an hour and a half ago, but then I got distracted and ended up IMing with Heidi about small, tacky amusement parks which is research for a book I’m not even sure I’m going to write. So now it’s ten o’clock but I only have to do this for [...]

So I had huge plans for this weekend–exercising, working on AKMG, wallpapering the bathroom, cleaning the office–and then ate and slept my way through four solid days and got absolutely nothing done.
So it’s time for Shame, one of my chief motivators. (Not Shane, Shame.)
I read someplace (Fly Lady, maybe) that if you take [...]

I’ve been thinking about Zelda and James, and I realized that I have once again committed the same mistake I always make: I’ve given them negative goals. It’s all the more galling since we were just talking about this on CherryForums and I did a huge post on it. And then I rewrote [...]

I went over James’s first scene one more time, this time on paper (I went over all of Act One on paper because once you print it out it looks entirely different and you find things you’d missed before, and yes, I’ll fix the dates, I swear) and the first chapter rose from 6880 to [...]

So I just cut James’s introductory scene stuff from 7,225 words to 2,816. Which was still three hundred words too many. Scylla’s scene was 2242, so it was already short, but I cut it to 1988 anyway because once you get cutting, it doesn’t hurt that much. That put the first chapter [...]

One of the hardest things about writing is keeping the outside out of your head. When you’re writing and the story is in there so strong and you’re going ninety miles an hour, and then the phone rings and you answer it and it’s somebody foisting their wing-nutted-ness on you and suddenly the outside’s [...]

I’m still cutting James’s scene, but Zelda’s is first draft done, until I get the whole book done and come back and write it again, but definitely enough to anchor the beginning of the book. It’s too dialogue heavy still, so some of that will go to put more physical cues on the page, but [...]

For those who asked, I can’t talk about the Fun Book, it’s still in the squishy stage when it has to be just me. I wouldn’t have brought it up here except that it’s taking time away from You Again and that’s what the Twelve Days are about, what happens as I try to [...]