11 September 2002

Well, I got a big fat load of nothing done yesterday.

Actually, that's not quite true. I wrote around 1200 words on the novel, mostly while I was at work. But that was only, I suspect, because I had so little else to do. Heck, I wrote the first 500 or so words during a staff meeting.

And I did help Mike with a couple of weird Oracle things, and check out some possible problems from the testers. And I went to the store with Matt, confining myself to only a half-dozen or so impulse buys.

(As an aside... Lines at the grocery store are kind of hit-or-miss. I understand that. Some cashiers are better than others, and I'm usually pretty patient with trainees or relatively new hires. But we hit the jackpot last night. The cashier was a new hire with a fake diamond earring half the size of his earlobe and the excruciatingly awful habit of chewing his gum with his mouth open who still didn't know what half the messages on his terminal meant, and who failed to realized that when you ring in a carton of cigarettes, two boxes of eggs, and some cheese and come up with a total of over $70, it means you probably accidently rang in the cigarettes multiple times. And - to match! - the guy with the cigarettes and eggs and cheese was one of those crotchety old men who walks around in shorts and a too-thin undershirt and who stands on precise principles in order to teach you a lesson or something. The kid miscounted his change, then couldn't figure out how to open his register to fix it when the old guy pointed it out. Matt offered the old guy a quarter - he was shorted by twenty cents - but he refused. He lurked by the register until our purchase was done to make sure he got his twenty cents. To boot, the cashier failed to notice my $3.50 worth of coupons on the conveyor belt, so when he picked up the last item, they got sucked right underneath. I was ready to kick both the cashier and the old guy in the shins by the time we left.)

(How's that for a long aside?)

But I mostly spent the day vegetating. Matt left to go see Signs with K.T., and I thought, Okay. Now we'll sit down and get some writing done!

But first I wanted to finish reading the short story I'd interrupted to go to work in the morning. Did that. Then I wanted to read what I've printed out so far of the novel. Did that. Went and started some rice to have with my leftover Chinese food that I was having for dinner. Set the timer. Came back to the computer, ready to get started.

Beep!

My phone. I didn't feel like moving everything off my lap to go get the phone, so I waited for the matching e-mail to come through. Karen was online and bored.

So I logged into IRC and chatted with her a little about movies. Went and got my dinner, continuing to chat for a bit while I ate. Jeff logged in, and Karen and I included him in the chat.

I opened the file I'd intended to work on.

Read through it.

Realized that the order of events wasn't quite what I'd thought they were, so I reworked a couple of paragraphs.

And then I got rather firmly stuck. One of Our Heroes is participating in a contest of skill. I don't want to write out a blow-by-blow, because it would be unbelievably boring for the reader. At the same time, I don't want to skip through it in one paragraph, because that's not enough to build any kind of tension.

I've got several options for how to boil the contest down to about a page. I just haven't decided which one to go with. And last night, I was struggling for even ideas. (Sleeping on it helped. Yay, sleep.)

So I put the file away. I thought about writing something else - a side project unrelated to the novel that I've been kicking around in my head. That didn't want to coalesce, either.

So I muttered and grumbled and gave up, opening a fiction site I've been slowly working my way through. (I'd provide a link, but it's a framed sub-page of another site, and if you try to go straight to the sub-page, you get auto-redirected to the main page of the site. It's pretty slick, but kind of annoying.)

Here's a bit for my Hall friends: The story I read last night was a story about a cop and a couple of criminals and the cop's partner. The cop's name? Val. The partner's name? Bastian. As if that weren't enough, Bastian spent the whole story being the good guy. The sympathetic and caring and loyal friend. The guy who was working his ass off to locate a crimelord and bring him to justice. (That part gives me the giggles still.) And Val? Before long, Val was hiding the two criminals in his apartment.

Matt came home, and we continued to sit around for a while. We went to bed a little after eleven. A little after midnight, we conceded that we weren't actually tired yet, and got up again. Another hour later, we were tired, and went back to bed.

I know you envy my fast-paced, never-dull, laugh-a-minute life.

--Liz