Argh. Heather's flight home has been delayed by two hours. Meh. I was hoping to have some time to hang out with her, but the evil of American Airlines won't allow that to happen -- she'll pretty much have to go straight to bed when she gets home, since we have work tomorrow. Sucks.

I have about two and a half hours before I need to go pick her up, and I suppose I could work on my novel some more, but I'm pretty sick of sitting at my desk. (I did work some today, earlier.)

If you hate word count type things, quit reading, because that's all this paragraph is. It's been a ridiculously productive week. In the nine days since Heather left, I've written 33,000 words on my novel. More than a third of the book! It only averages out to about 3,700 words a day, but of course, I didn't do it in any sensibly average way -- my best day was 10,250 words (on my day off, when I did basically nothing but work on the book), and my lightest day was 2,130 words, and there was one day I didn't work on the book at all (I did my freelance non-fiction writing that day instead). I've been aiming all along to finish the rough first draft by the end of June, so I can send it to some first readers and revise it before sending it to my editor. (The real deadline is in September.) I wasn't sure I was going to make that self-imposed first draft deadline, but now it seems doable. The manuscript stands at 63,000 words now, and I have an outline with what I need to accomplish in each scene of the remaining four and a half chapters. In theory, writing the last 20,000 words or so should be pretty easy. That's the idea, anyway.

And... that's pretty much it. Productive writing weeks make for boring journal entries. I did go see Oceans 13, and thought it was a fairly diverting and enjoyably implausible caper movie. Unfortunately, I like my movies to have interesting characters, and with so many characters, none of them were particularly interesting, only just barely sketched-in stereotypes. I had the same problem with the earlier films in the series, but it was worse this time, with only the most token gestures toward characterization. Ah, well.