You know how some psychologists sometimes say abandonment by parents is a three-year old’s worst fear?

Well.

Gamma is five now, but nobody tell CPS all the same.

We were going to go dancing, as we do Fridays. Dance lessons I mean. We went to our friends’ house, the ones we go dancing with. We decided we were too tired and sat around talking instead – we’ll go to the Sunday lesson instead.

They opened a bottle of wine, it got late. Beta studied English with their daughter, who she goes to school with.

Gamma went to bed in their younger daughter’s bed, who’s a little older than her but not much. Fell right to sleep. When it came time to leave, we didn’t want to disturb her. They said they’d drop her off tomorrow morning.

Still, when we got home we were like, “Where’s Gamma?” for an instant. Then, “Oh, right.”

Maybe she’ll sleep like a log. Maybe they (and we) will have an interesting night. We’ll see.

I already miss her.

Oops.
[via enigmatic mermaid]

Just to be on the safe side, anyone ever read a Brazilian novel in which a dying cop uploads his soul to a computer network and rides around in a little helicopter hunting bad guys?

So far so good. I had a few things planned out, but basically this is proceeding naturally, like an apple falling off a tree and rolling down a hill into a ditch, where it rots and gets eaten by ants and doodle bugs.

The plan is to simply turn off the critical part of my brain – which is, ahem, not that high-voltage to begin with, and just shoot for quantity. I can go through later and save the bits that sound okay and fix the bits that are implausible or screamingly bad. Just go for the 50,000 words. NaNoWriMo is such a good idea (I think, now, in the first week, before I hit the wall). At breakfast, I read an article about it in the Japan Times, pretty cool. Although, my last novel was 88k, so I’m hoping this will eventually be longer too.

I’m thinking it will probably be finished before I get that far, in which case the padding will begin I will have space, and hopefully time, to develop the characters more, and so on…

In college, when I had a paper to write, I would find all these other tasks that needed doing, like feed the cat, clip my nails, even make my bed. So now that I’ve decided to write a book in a month or less, dishes are getting washed, man. The garbage is getting taken out without anyone having to tell me.

14,000 words, man, in three days. Of course, I probably used to type that much in a single morning playing wordracer…

Snow! Little teeny flakes of snow!

The word count updates must be getting old, so I’ll just post the link to my NaNoWriMo profile, which includes a short excerpt and a more or less up-to-date word count.

Also, I’m trying to update my links list on the left there. I’m now using www.blogrolling.com which makes it a lot easier to manage; there were a lot of people I’d wanted to add before but didn’t simply because I’m lazy and it was a pain in the ass to make those little miniature screenshots. The list is supposed to put the most recently-updated weblogs at the top…