Well, it was a lovely long weekend (yay for 3-day weekends!) but now, alas, it’s time to start the work week again…and it turns out that that’s not so bad, after all. I was in such a grim mood all last week—sorry about that! I think my blog entries were pretty whiney. It was great to have three days off, though, to sit outside in the sunshine, reading and writing, and to just completely decompress. It’s amazing how much better I feel about work (and life!) after those few days off.

And hey, I even wrote a new short-short story over the weekend! I’ve written so few short stories this year, because of my relentless NovelNovelNovel!! focus. It felt good to get back into short story-writing practice. Better yet, I’m nearly done with Chapter Seven of Congress of Shadows, hurray!

And after spending the weekend reading Agatha Christie novels, I’m feeling much more laid-back and less self-judgmental about the whole writing thang. I think my problem was that I’d been reading too many rants by wanting-to-be-respected-by-literary-critics SF novelists (all representing the “Novels Must Be Bleak and Grim Or Else They Are Not Worthy” movement), and it was making me feel horribly insecure. My new conclusion, based on this weekend, is this: Genre novels are inherently fun. And I really like them that way. So my new personal writing motto is: Less Pressure. More Fun! And anyway, it’s hopeless to pretend that my novels could be credibly called “literary fantasy” when you think about the whole smoke-monsters-eating-people-issue, so I figure that I may as well just be pleased with who I am and what I enjoy writing, and stop worrying about what other people might think of it.

Whew! Enough ranting of my own. It’s a beautiful, sunny day out, and today I broke through a big block on Adobe Photoshop that had been holding me up at work for weeks. It’s been a good start to the week.