Ohhhh, I hate getting up when it's still pitch black outside. This is the worst downside of fall/winter...the feeling that the days are slowly shrinking in around us... Lately, during the woozy early morning hours as I've staggered around, preparing coffee and trying to think authorially for our pre-work writing sessions, I've coped mostly by zooming into a kind of exhaustion high, complete with tons of really geeky bad jokes (usually, yes, I have to confess it, LotR-related). (The movies AND the books. I AM a geek!) Luckily, Patrick snickers when I tell them. I am a very lucky woman. :)

I did a first, very surface-level pass through Masks & Shadows yesterday before passing it on to another critiquer. Sigh. I'm just at that awkward, irritating stage where I see all the problems but don't know how to solve them. Hate that! The rewriting itself isn't that bad...it's the figuring out HOW to rewrite that's a real pain, and it doesn't get easier with each book, at least not for me.

In the meantime, though, I just started writing Chapter Three of The Music of the Stars, and I'm really enjoying it. I'm still jogging, too, though with the lurking rainclouds in the sky today, we'll see how my persistence fares...(Deathmatch: stubbornness vs. aversion to cold rain. Who Will Win?)

I'm still fairly punchy with tiredness, as you can tell. Oh well. Time to go meet about a possible temp job. Money money money! Woohoo! :)

And then maybe I'll finally wake up...