Today, I have this crazy plan. I'm going to work all day. Well, pretty much all day -- I need to wash dishes at some point. Tonight Heather and I are going out for her birthday dinner (tomorrow is her big day), and then doing a hot tub afterward, and tomorrow we'll probably do brunch. So, today, I'm going to work. Here's what I plan to do:

Read a whole bunch of short stories, including the latest ish of LCRW and F&SF.

Finish reading The Year of Our War. It's good, but I've been reading it very slowly, because I'm mostly spending my lunch breaks writing, not reading. I have other books in the queue vying for my attention, though, so it's time to finish YoOW.

(See, that's just reading! That ain't hardly a bit like work!)

Revise "Bluebeard and the White Buffalo."

Type in and revise "Impossible Dreams."

Type in old story "Events in Circle Seven", that I found in a notebook from a couple of years ago and discovered was pretty good.

Type in old story "Post, Ergo, Procter", which I found in the same notebook, and which is also pretty good.

Read through the novel I wrote before Rangergirl -- The Genius of Deceit, as longtime readers may recall -- and decide if it's publishable. I think it could be, once I do some rearranging of the beginning and some line-editing. There's a lot of great stuff in this book; I think there are some fixable structural problems and a lot of sloppy writing that a pass or two of line-edits could fix. I've been thinking about the book a lot lately, and Heather made an offhand comment that she thought it was about a draft away from being good enough. It's been years since I read it, and I may find it unbearable to read, but if I think it's close, I'll work on it a bit and then see what my agent thinks. Even if I, or my agent, decide it's not worth trying to sell, I might clean it up and put it online as a shareware novel á la John Scalzi's Agent to the Stars. I'm just awfully fond of the book, and think it's the first novel I wrote that actually works as a novel (my previous three attempts, though they were indeed prose works of novel-length, were failures in various interesting and profound ways). I'd like people to be able to read it.

Oh, yeah, and my other goal today is to write a few journal entries chronicling my day's journey of writing/reading/working, because I haven't done that in a long time.

It's starts now, at 9:50 a.m., with the Making of the First Pot of Coffee.

11:30 a.m.

Okay, I've done my plausibility study on The Genius of Deceit, read the first forty pages thoroughly and skimmed the rest, and it's a lot better than I'd expected. I think I could make it into something good. So I'll spend my next day off, Wednesday, whipping it into shape, then see what my agent thinks about its prospects.

Next up: some typing.

1:30 p.m.

Hmm. I think I've been too ambitious. I thought "Impossible Dreams" was about 3,000 words long, but I misremembered; it's closer to 6,000, so I'm still typing it (only about 2,000 words left to go, though). The first draft is cleaner than I'd expected! Today's just full of pleasant surprises that way.

I doubt I'll get around to typing those older stories this afternoon. Ah, well. They've waited two years, so they can wait a couple more days. I'm going to take a break from the keyboard to give my wrists a rest and read The Year of Our War for a bit.

2:50 p.m.

Done with Year of Our War! Of course, now I want to read the sequel, No Present Like Time, and I have to wait, since it's not out yet. Sigh. My boss has the manuscript, so maybe I can read it on lunch breaks.

Back to the typing.

5:50 p.m.

Well, that's it for me. I got "Impossible Dreams" typed (all 6700 words of it), Heather read it (it made her cry, which is good, since I intended it to be a sweet love story), I line-edited it, corrected it, and got it all packaged up to mail on Monday. So I failed to revise "Bluebeard" and didn't type in my other two stories, and have only read one story so far in LCRW. So I only finished, like, two things on my list. But that's okay. The other things can just hang out on the list until I finish them, and I did work all day, so I feel no guilt, except maybe for setting unattainable goals for myself, which is a cruel way to treat me...

Soon, we go away for dinner and hot-tubbing and merriment. Hope you all are enjoying some local variant of the same.