So, tomorrow morning I'm putting Daniel on a plane to Seattle, where he goes to join this year's Clarion West class. Almost exactly a year from the day that I hopped on a plane to Seattle to part of the Clarion West class of 2002.

I'm going to miss him while he's gone, and I'm feeling a bit nostalgic about my own time at CW, but mostly I'm excited that Daniel's going to have this experience. (And, of course, I'll get to relive my Clarion West days just a little bit, vicariously.)

The one year anniversary of my departure for Clarion West provides a good excuse for me to re-evaluate my own writing goals. When I got back from Clarion, I made a couple of decisions. First, that I was going to be much more disciplined about revising critiqued work and getting it out to editors who might buy it. Second, that I was going to back burner a couple of novel projects that I'd been kicking around in a desultory way, and really focus on cranking out short stories for a year.

I've done quite well on the first goal. I haven't entirely eliminated my unrevised backlog, not by a long shot. But I've got a lot more stories out there, and I'm getting better at working revisions into my writing workflow.

Second goal: eh, so so. I did backburner the novel projects. I did write new short stories. I just haven't been producing new work at the pace I'd like.

But, I have been toying with the idea of working on a novel. The big question in my mind is: do I want to resurrect one of the old projects that I was kicking around last year, or do I want to start something entirely fresh? I have about 10,000 words of an adult high-fantasy novel drafted, and about 10,000 words of something that I think is a YA contemporary fantasy novel. And a space opera that never got past a scrawled scenelet or two and a few pages of notes.

Hmmm. Probably what I need to do is dig all this stuff out and read over it.

The other question on my mind is when I'm going to find time to write all of this. Work plus commute has been really squeezing my writing time, and when my contract ends, I'll have to look for another job, which is plenty time consuming, and also not very conducive to a creative state of mind.

However, my boss at my current job may have solved my problem for me, which is pretty remarkable, considering that he doesn't know that I have this problem. He'd like to extend my contract, which was scheduled to end at the end of July, for anther six months, but at only twenty hours a week. Perfect solution: I'd have steady work and a steady paycheck, and if I'm not able to make more time to write on that schedule, well, then I'm just hopeless.

This arrangement needs to be approved by my boss's boss, though, so it's not a sure thing yet. It should all be worked out in the next couple of weeks.

Work yesterday was fun. I sat down and wrote a couple of Word macros to automate a couple of the more mechanical and repetitive tasks I'd been doing. I should have done this weeks ago. Visual Basic for Applications looks rather intimidating, but by recording a couple of macros that did almost what I wanted, and then inspecting their code and looking up different commands in the online help, I was able to knock them together fairly quickly. Yay! I've saved myself hundreds, if not thousands, of future mouse clicks!

Best part is, I've put the macros in the global template, so I've saved all my cow-orkers hundreds if not thousands of future mouse clicks.

I hate mouse clicks. Almost as bad as mouse cliques. Nasty snobby mice.

Today is a Friday off for me, and I'm spending it pleasantly with Daniel, except for a couple of hours this afternoon where I have to go see a man about a microbe. (I'm meeting with a couple of scientists about a grant proposal I'm helping them write.)

Have a swell afternoon, all. Type at you later!