an enormous selfie without makeup and a confession

sometimes i deliberately don't blog because i'm embarrassed that my word count hasn't changed.

word count: 33,365

pumpkins meow and writer nerd updates

happy friday y'all (look!  i've managed to blog two days in a row now!  i must have lots and lots of free time again right?  ...right????)

okay, maybe i'm still feeling a little swamped attempting to find invitations as pretty as these ones for less than $9 a pop.  thank goodness the weekend is tomorrow.  the bags under my eyes are getting a bit too persistent even for clinique quick-corrector concealer (a travesty i say)!

bert is also one pissy monkey these days and will not stand for the idea of me getting a full night's sleep, no sir.  he isn't coping well with being left alone on weekends (sorry cat that's the reason we got you--a cat, instead of a golden retriever puppy.  deal with it).

in other news, our halloween pumpkins have apparently been bothering the stevedore with their lack of being cut open.  last night he caved to temptation (or perhaps he just wanted to entertain bert so he'd let us sleep through the whole 7 hour night) and carved bert's little pumpkin into the cutest cat-o-lantern i have ever seen in my life!  i sure am lucky to be marrying a guy patient enough to carve those intricate little whiskers.  you've got to be patient to sign up for a lifetime with little 'ol me (especially a sleep deprived version).

but now, for my totally self-centered, self-important, self-satisfied news:  i have officially passed the 100-page mark of my work in progress.  i haven't had a chance to celebrate, but it's really a very exciting accomplishment for me (i suspect there might be an extra big glass of wine for me tonight).  i could go into all the details of how proud i feel, but in order not to sound like a twit, i'll keep my comments to this:  if you've ever considered punching self-doubt in the face with a creative endeavor, i highly recommend it.  it's stellar.

now let's just get through these last few hours til the weekend is officially here.

word count:  30,726

bits and pieces

i couldn't really sleep last night, which made me expect today to be dreadful.  quite the opposite, i'm rather punch drunk and giddy for the following reasons:

due to packing, i have tons of clean laundry right now.

steve comes home tonight!

the guy who wolf whistled me this morning definitely appeared to live inside of a building (ok giddy might be a bit much to say about this one, but it's a step up from getting accosted by homeless men).

and.....

i have successfully surpassed the 10,000 word milestone with my draft!

that one, for me, is really big.  if you need a little perspective that's 39 word doc pages with 1" margins double spaced times new roman size 12.

of course, this also means i'm only about 1/5 of the way there, but it's pretty exciting when you have the opportunity to surprise yourself.  given my track record of false starts i honestly expected to peter out somewhere around nine pages.  i cannot express how glad i am that i decided to keep myself honest by posting my word count to this blog (thank you everyone who encouraged me to do this).

the thing i've learned about creativity so far is that, even though the work is more fun, it's still work.  inspiration isn't all it's chalked up to be.  creativity is a skill, but a creative project is a task and it requires the same mundane, frustrating, laborious crap that i see everyday in the workplace.  realizing this, makes the task at hand seem a lot more manageable.  if i can plug away at databasing building stats, i can definitely plug away at a novel.

"Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties -- all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name's Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion -- these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated." - david foster wallace

"No kid can do whatever they want to do. It's a total lie, but they have the right to try to do whatever they want to do. That's their right, to aim to do whatever they want to do. And you know what? Life might kick you in the face, life might not let you do what you want to do, but [my grandparents] always taught me that, you know, 'Go for it! Yeah, you wanna do that? Go for it, son, you've gotta do it.'" - james mcavoy

happy giddy tuesday, folks!

word count: 11,329