11:15 a.m.

It's my day off. (Which is usually the day when I work the hardest. Ah, writing.) I've written 2,500 words so far on Dead Reign this morning. Revelations are revealed! Jokes are cracked! Etc.!

I decided to take a mid-morning break, like, one sentence before Marla meets the Walking Death for the first time. Because that, my friends, will be an easy entry point when I go back to writing later today. It's a scene I've been looking forward to. I'd like to get 5,000 words done today. We shall see. 5,000 words a week is my absolute minimum goal. At that rate, I should have a draft done in 14 more weeks. Which, coincidentally, is how long I have to turn in the manuscript (it's due in September). I'd like to get a draft done faster than that, and expect to be pretty productive in June when Heather leaves me for a week (sob) but I try to plan for worst-case scenarios. I'm going to screw around for twenty minutes or so, then do a bit more work, then go out for a walk this afternoon and run some errands (and get some damn exercise). More later.

2:00 p.m.

I ran errands. Very exciting. Picked up some stamps, and cursed the new weird postal rates which charge you extra if you're mailing stuff that's shaped funny, making the cost of mailing Flytrap jump by about 27 cents per issue. (We ship 'em first class. They're too light to make shipping by Bound Printed Matter economical, alas.) We'll probably have to raise our rates, though not until issue #8, since issue #7 is already at the printer. We'll eat the cost on those, because we're very generous people (also, we do the 'zine for love, not in hopes of breaking even.) So, um, subscribe before we get slightly pricier.

After my errands I sat in the grass by the lake and read Dishwasher for a while. After a couple of gray days, the weather got gorgeous this afternoon. Now I'm back home with a margarita and writing ahead of me.

I've done seven and a half of the nine items on my to-do list. Whoo!

...except just now I got page proofs for Blood Engines in the mail, which is another item for the to-do list. But I'll go over those this weekend. It's so pretty, seeing the pages all laid out... nice frontispiece design too. Bantam has really done right by me.

4:00 p.m.

Whoo. Did about 5700 words total today. Definitely some good progress. I wrote a fight scene! Marla got her ass kicked. Also wrote a couple of funny scenes and one that's an infodump (swirled together with some jokes in hopes no one will notice its expository glory). The whole manuscript stands at around 20,000 words now. Almost a quarter of the way done...

Now I get to take out the trash and wash dishes! The glamour! That's probably enough of this entry for the day. Eating dinner and writing Lost are hardly noteworthy.

Don't think I've linked to my "Caught in the Net" column in a couple of weeks. The latest is in honor of national masturbation month: "Mastering Your Domain". And here's last week's, "Sex and Science". You can read earlier ones here, including articles on blogs by submissives and the natural follow-up, blogs by doms. Contains naughty words and images, etc.