Saturday, 09 October 2004

I took a day off from work yesterday. I'd been feeling really burned out and unproductive. Also, the last three-day weekend had been spent traveling. While fun, it wasn't really a break. So yesterday, a day off specifically meant as a break.

I'm feeling much better now. The past few weekends, I also felt much better after two days off, but then had to go right back to work. Now I've got one more day.

I tried to write on Friday, but got absolutely nothing written. After I finally gave up and went to bed, I realized that I'd gotten the first paragraph wrong, and that's why I couldn't write the next one. So, this morning I wrote a new first paragraph and things took off from there. I've got 1100 all-new words. I'm working on the demon story. This is my oldest unfinished story, and one that I'm really pleased to be back to.

This story has a sort of a wrapper around it: something is set up at the beginning and paid off at the end. It's a cool thing, but it's not a plot. I realized that I'd been leaning on this one cool thing a bit too heavily, so I've been restructuring the story in my head to de-emphasize it in favor of having a full-blown plot.

In the new version, it's a spy story. It's also kind of a gadget story. Maybe almost an Analog story. With demons. I've been doing a lot of world-building in my head as well, and have been trying to slip bits of that into the story.

I'm excited about it.

Jackie got together with some spinners this morning. They were meeting near campus, so I went in with her and spent the morning at the Green Street Coffee House writing on the laptop. That worked very well. We had lunch at a newish place on campus. In the afternoon I did another bunch of writing here at home. In the evening, we watched Buffy commentary from season six (which we finished last week, except for the commentary).