A dense fog has engulfed our area since early this morning and doesn't seem to want to go away. After a day of cold rain which brought the temperatures back down into the low thirties, the fog moved in. A nice little side-effect of all this suspended water vapor is that it has trapped car exhaust and other pollutants in the air, making it feel like you're standing directly behind a bus exhaust being bathed in diesel fumes. I nearly gagged when I went to Chick-Fil-A for lunch.

This week has been hellaciously busy at work. I got a huge project unexpectedly dumped in my lap, which screwed my entire schedule for all the other jobs that were waiting for me to work on them. It's been really frustrating and I've been working long days to get everything finished. I'll be coming in tomorrow, but at least I'll get paid overtime.

Class on Wednesday was interesting, as it was the first actual workshop class. We looked at the first two novel outlines on the chopping block. The critique was toally different than what I'm used to; it was free-form where anybody talked any time. It was more of a discussion than a critique. I'm used to a more rigid form of critique, like how I used at Clarion and how we use in Cup-a-Prose, where one person gives their critique and only them. The author has to wait until the end to speak, unless the critiquer has direct questions. One person at a time. Consequently, I didn't speak up much on Wednesday, mostly for that reason but also because I actually critiqued the outline and not the novel like everyone else. Plus, this is a high level graduate course, and many of these people have already been in classes with each other. It just means I'll have to work that much harder.

So anyway, because this week has been so busy, and I've been utterly exhausted when I get home from work, I haven't done any writing, either on the novel, or the outline, or the reviews I owe to Green Man. I hate it when this happens. I don't feel like I've been at all productive, even when I've been working so hard I'm ready to scream and start hitting people.

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Now Reading:
A Painted House by John Grisham

Stories Out to Publishers:
9

Novel Word Count:
18,800