A snow day!

So that’s a view from my balcony. It’s all fuzzed out, because (a) I know nothing about photography, digital or otherwise, and (b)  it’s snowing purty durn hard. Figured I’d show you guys.

Personally I like this kind of weather. I was out in it for several hours yesterday, even though I started off thinking I had only a couple of things to do. Hell, I’ll give details. I needed to do the following:

1. Drop my daughter off at her daycare, two miles from our condo.
2. Hang out and write somewhere.

Nice, huh? Picking her up later might have been my job, or not. So…

• I couldn’t get my truck out of its parking space
• I was only in that space because (a couple of days before) I couldn’t drive the thing up a hill to its “assigned” spot
• While I was messing with that, a neighbor told me the spot I was in was actually reserved for someone else, not a free “visitor” spot as I’d previously thought
• I dropped the kid off via the bus (I’d have just walked, but she’s four and it’d have interfered with the rest of her group…more on that in a bit) and found a coffee shop
• I got 24 oz. of free cold-brew out of my story (because I’m in Alaska) and sat down to write…but then thought it might be better to resolve the truck thing before somebody towed it
• I took another bus, remembered I’d always liked buses because of the conversations, and bought some tire chains from the only local store that sells them even though I’d have preferred a heftier set
• A friendly passerby stopped instead of passing, and gave me a ride from the bus stop all the way back to the condo (because I’m in Alaska–about eight miles total btw)
• I then spent about two hours lying in the snow with temps in the mid-twenties, generally at least partly under my truck. Turns out the chains barely fit the tires at all, and also since I couldn’t roll the truck forward or backward, and spinning the wheels to move the chains was possible but tended to throw them off the tire entirely…well, it took some time
• I drove the truck, easily, up the hill
• I found email from my wife, saying she was getting off early due to the weather. I’d decided I needed some sort of tool to make chaining and unchaining the tires easier, ‘specially if I was going to tell her “your turn!” the next day, so I went to meet her at a hardware store near her office
• We looked at all sorts of dingi, but settled on a contraption we made from a ratchet, a strap, a couple of hooks, and a carabiner. It worked nicely in our trial in the parking lot
• We picked up the kid, whereupon I learned we had movies that were due back at Blockbuster and of course the kid wanted some new ones
• On the way home (finally! time to write!) it turned out it didn’t matter if the truck could get up the hill in the parking lot…because it couldn’t, even with chains, get up the hill in the…er…gosh-darned…street
• We tried that a lot of times. Went all over the road. Entertained many in the process
• I drove back to my wife’s office
• We took the bus home

So there I was, at long last, done with daycare. (You felt every second of it, didn’t you? I mean the two of you who actually read all that.) My hands hurt from pulling and twisting tire chains. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast (incidentally I’d fed the kid too, only to find out via my wife that the kid had told her mostly-outdoor daycare type, who’d taken the kids sledding, that she was too hungry and hadn’t eaten yet…grr), my hands were sore from all the fighting with chains, and also? It was 7pm.

So I wrote no words yesterday. Instead, see, I basically spent the day getting my daughter to daycare. Clever, no? Oh, and I drank some whiskey. It was nice.

That said…I want to tell you guys I’m really excited about this new thing I’m trying to create first drafts. I’m up to averaging over 2700 words a day in my two-hour period, and the count seems to be increasing (except, of course, for yesterday). I’ve nearly cracked 3000 words twice, and expect that to become my new “normal” fairly soon.

Also I think I’m within a couple of days of finishing the first draft of The Secret. I say “I think” because the middle turned out to be longer than I thought it would, and then there was a new “end” after the point I’d previously thought the novel would end, and that turned out to require more stuff toward the beginning…and so forth. I’m not ready to alert the beta-reader squad yet, ’cause after all I’m days behind on the editing/fixing phase and I have lots of work to do before they see it…but still. It feels pretty good.

So my word count was a little low today (2794), and now I’ve written this, and also now I need to do some pre-thinking so I’ll be ready to continue with Bleed on the Sky in a few days.

I’ll get to the editing part soon, I think. But I figure getting new stuff written like this is like a Christmas present from the universe to me, and I wanted to say: Thanks, Cosmos! You rock!

Now if, after the intense white-hot fingerfest of creation, I could also have a bit more energy left to work on other stuff…I mean on a regular basis…hmm.

Enough, you know, is never enough.

Have fun out there!