Bleh. My schedule says I've got a conference call this afternoon from 1 to 5. It's a monthly meeting, and it doesn't usually actually run that long - but it will certainly go to 3 or 3:30, at least. Yech.

At least it's a conference call, so no one will be able to see if I'm writing or sketching when it's not my turn to talk. (Must figure out how to mute my phone...)

I got some good writing done yesterday. I think. Well, at least I got some writing done. About 1400 words. Not much compared to the pre-Penny days, of course, but I'll take what I can get.

As to whether it's any good, I guess I'll have to wait and see. I can usually judge a little better after I've let it sit for a few days. And K.T. will let me know, of course. In fact, all the work I did yesterday was in response to her comments on a chapter I'd thought was finished.

I'm having a harder time with Silver and Green, even discounting Penny's disruptive element. Circle in the Sand was a romance and a political intrigue, combined with some action/adventure stuff. The bad guys wanted power and wealth, but they weren't really all that monstrous.

In Silver and Green, we have an antagonist who is - quite literally - a monster, and while I wouldn't call Silver and Green a horror novel, there's a certain element of the horrific about it. I have never read very much horror, and I'm not very good at writing it.

(Note to self: We need a better title, too. Silver and Green was fine for the original short story, because of the point of view, but since the novel's PoV changes so much, those colors alone are no longer representative, and I'll be damned if we're going to call it Silver and Green and Black and Red. Of course, it'll probably be another year before we're even close to finishing it, so we've got some time to think about it.)

Matt got home with Penny yesterday and said, "She's going to be hungry real soon." She had last been fed at 2, and Matt didn't get home with her until 5:30.

Well, fine. I figured, if she was going to be hungrier than usual, I could get out some food that she's a little less interested in. I got out a jar of green beans, and decided we could try carrots again.

She's lost her aversion to carrots, it seems - she was eagerly opening her mouth for more, and fussing when I didn't fill up the spoon fast enough. And she took the green beans willingly enough, though it was clear that they still weren't going to be her favorite.

She finished both jars. Two whole jars of food is more than she's ever eaten before in one feeding, so I'm feeling pretty happy about it.

I was looking in the pantry this morning, and if I'm sending 1-2 jars of food with her to daycare every day, plus giving her another 1-2 jars of food for dinner at night, then I'm going to run out of food that she's willing to eat before Sunday's grocery trip. It may be time to start buying the bigger jars, at least of certain things, like squash and applesauce.

Another week, and we'll be ready to try her on some mixed foods, anyway. ("Try," hell. I found the easiest way to shovel the green beans in her last night was to mix them with the carrots. And daycare has been mixing applesauce into her cereal for weeks.)

I wonder when we get to introduce Cheerios.

--Liz