On to the next chapter. The last one took a lot of time!

Russ unexpectedly came home, so I'm taking a short break.

I think this is going well, despite a number of interruptions.

On to the third chapter.

I wil lhave to go back to these earlier ones again when Russ gets home. He has my line edits in the car still, and I want to go over this section again with them in hand. I had some changes I made on the papers that I want to make certain I included. I think I got most of them...

Anyway, on to the next chapter. I'm moving along well, at least.

In other news....

One of my publishers is looking for a manuscript back from me. So, I'm basically dropping everything else for a while and working on it again. I should never have let it go this far.

Oh! And one of the anthologies I'm in is on sale at Barnes & Noble. I have a few things (both e and print) at Amazon, but this is the first Barnes and Noble. Funny how you can watch your little career moving ahead by such bits and pieces. It's From Within the Mist. I can't get the link to work right now. As soon as I get a chance, I'll put it up on my site, though.

Anyway, I have 22 chapters left to edit -- already did one this morning. They're mostly short. Let's see how long it takes me to get them all done...

Thanks everyone who liked the previous picture. It was taken about 3am on a very foggy morning here. I love shots like that -- unexpected beauty.

Yesterday was our anniversary. Russ and I had gone to Colorado as an anniversary trip. He worked part of the day but came home a bit early and we went to Omaha. We stopped at the wild life refuge along the way and I got the most incredible pictures of turtles that I've ever managed before. We had a lovely little Italian dinner (most of which came back home with us because the appetizers could have been dinner by themselves). We stopped at Borders and bought some DVDs (Cat Stevens, Joni Mitchell, In Search of Troy -- I love Michael Woods! -- and The Presidio movie.)

Then we drove back home. Since it's about two hours both ways we had lots of time to talk about things, like how much has changed since we married. VCRs were new. TSR80 computers were incredible. (We had one -- still have it, in fact, though in storage right now.)

No Internet back then. How life has changed since then!


Which brings us to another aspect of the day... dealing with children on the Internet. In this case being a child has nothing to do with age. It has everything to do with attitude -- How dare you say I can't tell you how to run the site, or start a debate on something that is not open to debate. It's my right! I get to say whatever I want whenever I want! And you HAVE TO LISTEN TO ME!

Well, as someone found out today... no, we don't have to listen to you. I am not going to debate whether to ban minors from Forward Motion. Aside from it being a stupid, thoughtless and arrogant thing to even suggest, no one is going to debate who can or cannot be a member of the site. The rule is simple: If you are interested in writing and you don't make trouble, you can be a member. I don't care what your age is, where you are from, if you are published or not. And I'm certainly not going to encourage such a debate and get other people upset thinking it might happen, just so that an over-aged child can tell people younger than her why she doesn't want them around.

I also said something that I seldom feel I need to point out -- The final decision for what happens at the site falls to me because it is, now, my site. Someone has to make certain decisions. That, of course, offended this person as well. Apparently she thought it was her site. Considering how little she contributed anyway, I don't know where she got that idea.

I have to admit, she brought a lot of laughter to our trip to Omaha.

Hello. Yes, still alive. Somewhat.

I am still sorting through vacation pictures, too, although this should be the last day, since I'm down to the last 122 shots from vacation. If I get through them, then I can post the already written trip report. Of course I've 'chosen' over 200 pictures, so I'm going to have to go through and cull the finished list as well. I figure I might allow myself only one out of every five pictures. Possibly one out of ten. I can then use the rest for daily posts until even I get bored looking at them.

I also have three more Vision articles called up and ready for an edit before I send them off to my wonderful copy editor. I'll get those done today. And if I can get my eyes to focus (they really don't want to) I may even be able to work with the Excel data sheet and get all the information in there for the contracts and get those emailed.

Those are my non-writing goals for the day. Sounds like a full day's worth of work to me. So my writing goal is going to be just another 1000 words on Sooma. Once I get the Vision stuff all finished I'm going to go back to some of the other work. Sooma is relatively easy since it's plotted, and I really am not getting very serious about it. I want to get it typed up so I can work on it at some time in the future, though. As expected, the prose sucks. The characters are horribly melodramatic, and I think I can find a plot somewhere in there.... but even so, it's been fun to work on. Fun is all right now and then.

I've also continued handwriting out Farstep Station since vacation. I'll get bored with working that way soon, but for the moment it's different. And I've been outlining The Wind and the Sand on my Clie. Everything is going well, but slowly. It's far too near the end of the month for me. I need to get myself moving a little better is all.

Ah, but here is a reason why I won't be getting very far ahead. A problem at the site right now that will take some tricks to fix, I think. Hmmm.... Time to talk to Mar. Personally, I think we should all get at least one day off a week from site work, but problems turn up all the time. This one is odd -- a missing thread that should not be missing at all.

We might be able to hunt it down.

Just need to talk to Mar before I do anything really drastic.

Ack. Just ack. I need to go write something.