Friday, 28 November 2003

Wrote one scene of the robot story, about 500 words.

I'm still in the discovery stage in this story. I have a general idea of the conflict and some notions about the character's arc, but I don't have enough details yet to know things like exactly what in the opening scene wants to resonate with stuff in the closing scene. So, I'm trying not to get caught up in details. I'll just write the first half or so to see where it's leading, with an expectation that the first bits may end up being quite different. Doing that once is fine. When I end up doing it four or five times (as I sometimes do) it's kind of inefficient.

Prairienet is still not functioning properly. It's back up and I can check my email (I got a few messages from late Wednesday) but it doesn't seem to be receiving new email just yet. Sigh.

We're eating Thanksgiving leftovers. We put off soup until tomorrow.

The other excitement here is that we're under a boil order! Oh, what fun.

I think I've got my submission database pretty much done.

I now have a main page with one table of all my stories that are out (with market, date submitted, and how many days that's been) and another table with all my non-trunked stories that are not out, with the number of days they've been languishing on my hard drive. There are forms where I can enter a new submission, get the submission history of a particular story, and get a report on market (whether I have stories there and whether it's closed or not).

I don't yet have something to suggest markets for stories. That turns out to be a bit harder than I'd realized. Still, I've got the essential parts.

Seeing the report with the days a story has been languishing does seem to be motivating. I spent a good bit of time trying to find a market for one story. I wasn't successful, though. I may have to trunk it.

I like four-day weekends.

Happy day after Thanksgiving!