11 November 2002

I had a very nice birthday. Matt gave me presents on the theme "colors" - the centerpiece being the 5-disc Black Adder DVD set! Isn't he just the greatest? (Poor Matt, though. It was the first thing he ordered, and it didn't come in time. He had to print out a picture and put it in an envelope so I'd have something to open.) I wrote a little bit in my blog about another one of the presents, last night.

I got quite a few CDs - Pink (that would be from Matt, of course) and Pink Floyd (which could have been from Matt, but wasn't) and Cowboy Mouth (which surprisingly enough was from Jill). And two DVDs. Both, sadly, were the same movie - Disney's Beauty and the Beast - but Target didn't give us too much trouble when we went to try to exchange it.

Of course, when I walked down the row of DVDs at Target looking for a replacement, I realized we should have waited a bit before doing the exchange; K.T. and Rachel opted to hold their gifts to me until this coming weekend, when Rachel will be in town, and I have no idea what either of them got me. K.T. told me later that she didn't get me a DVD, but I didn't know that at the time. Anyway, I still have no idea about Rachel, either, so I just picked out a movie, and taped the receipt to it, and I won't open it until after this weekend.

My parents took us out to eat and gave me an obnoxious card about how they didn't get me anything for my birthday. I laughed because it isn't true. They got Matt and I season tickets to the Chrysler Hall Broadway series, after all, and they took us out to eat at the Peddler. (Rare filet mignon. Mmmmmm.)

And Karen sent a bunch of writing and editing resources. Books about writing and getting ideas out and references. And actual editing tools like blue pencils and red pens and color-coded sticky notes. That was more exciting than it should have been, but then K.T. and I are getting awfully close to finishing the rough draft of the novel.

K.T. and I won't have a chance to sit down and talk about the novel until the day after Thanksgiving, so we hunkered down (figuratively speaking) online last night and broke out the segments remaining in Brothers In Arms, so we could divide them up.

I've got seven bits left to write. Seven. That's it. Two to three thousand words each, give or take five hundred words.

Another twenty thousand words, and my portion of the rough draft will be done.

(I'm a little astonished at myself for being so cavalier about twenty thousand words. I can remember when five hundred words seemed like a lot. Now it's barely worth sneezing about. K.T. estimates that our rough draft will break 300,000. It will most likely shrink in editing, but it still looks pretty damned impressive.)

I've been writing two or three segments a week. If this weren't November, I'd say I thought I could be done by the end of the month. But Rachel will be here this weekend - that'll cut into writing time. And Thanksgiving will cut into it some. And my project at work was just denied an extension, which means I might wind up having to put in some overtime to have it done on time - but in any case will be busy during the days, and I do a lot of my prime writing during slow moments at work.

So chances are I probably won't have it finished by the end of this month. But I can practically guarantee it will be done well before Christmas.

I'm really proud of us.

I wanted to say that now, before we move into the editing stage and are driven to try to kill each other.

--Liz