Teh Suck! Teh Suck!

It's the kickoff of week two on the NaNo calendar, when all those exuberant plans turn to suck. This is why you spend the first week building up a wordcount buffer, so Week Two can come by and consume it nom nom nom-style. I wrote a post on the Brigade topic about powering through this week. tl;dr version: just write anything, and count everything you write. And for the love of the Rhino, don't worry about what you've already written. There is no such thing as "continuity" in the first draft (or quality, or pacing) so if you're fretting about these things, stop right now, and write instead. Write about the fretting, even. I'm writing this on Saturday night, dosed up on cold medication and hot tea, on the cusp of the end of summer time and theoretically an extra hour of sleep (or writing. Let's not kid ourselves.) Plotwise, I'm about to step into that great unknown void in the middle of my story, where I know the characters need to get from point A to B, but I'm a little blurry on the specifics in between, and how some planned scenes fit into the schedule. The transitions will be rough and random, but I know I'll be able to smooth them out later, when I can breathe and look at the novel as a whole. That time is not now. Now it's time to embrace the suck, and move on, always on.

Reboot, Reset, Recharge

Typed on Morticia, the Olympia SM-3

Mysterious gaps due to me cutting out strikeouts with Gimp before uploading

* The "Out of Town" mail slot is a holdover from my rural upbringing. My hometown's post office had (and likely still has) a slot dedicated solely to local mail, though I was never clear on what that actually meant, as the definition of "town" was pretty fluid. I'm afraid that I don't know the specific reason why this warranted its own drop point and bin, though I suspect once upon a time, residents could supply far simpler addresses and the mail would get there just fine: "Aunt June Doe, Main Street." Only the fancy out-of-town stuff would require high-falutin' zip codes and full street addresses. That's my theory, anyhow.

It's been decades since I lived anywhere that had such a setup, but it's so ingrained that I check every single time I walk in to drop off mail, for fear of dropping it into the wrong opening, and inconveniencing a mail clerk. As if sixty Christmas cards in one dump wasn't an inconvenience on its own.