Monday, 14 March 2005

Properly catching up would be way too much work. I'll just leave it at thsi: Came home from the cruise. Put in a couple of weeks of work at the office. Went to Toulouse, France for a week on business. Caught a cold. Flew back home on Saturday.

This is Jackie spinning on our veranda during the cruise. More than one person who didn't get to meet Jackie at TorCon heard about her sitting in the hallway outside the Strange Horizon's party spinning yarn. In this picture she has a chair and she's probably spinning a different color of yarn, but it's otherwise pretty much the same.

I haven't done any writing in a long time. The last bit, I guess, was one session during the cruise. I've still got the same story in my head, though, which I think speaks well for the strength of that story idea.

In the last few days, I realized that I was going about it wrong. It's one of those stories where there's a story, but there's also a clever idea. As I often do, the fragments that I've written so far handle the clever idea pretty well, but give short shrift to the story. (Basically, I was going to have hero's central problem solved off-screen by some other guy.) The long gap in writing at least let me avoid that problem. I don't know exactly how the story goes even now, but it will have the hero solving the central problem himself.

Between the work and the travel, my cold got worse rather than better. I got home on Saturday, but spent Sunday lazing about and napping. I felt a bit better today, good enough to go to work, but ended up leaving early to come home and take another nap. I can't tell how much is just the cold, how much was from sleeping poorly last night (woke up several times coughing), and how much is the jet lag, but by early afternoon I was simply all wore out.

My cold is a bit better, though. Enough better that it might not keep me from sleeping tonight. So, I'm going to go to bed now and take advantage of that.

First, though, here's another picture of Jackie.