As I wind down my last Monday at the current Day Job, I find my focus dwindling. I have some odds and ends I must finish up here before I leave on Friday, but I don't feel that deadline pressure yet. So I've been piddling around.

I was going to work on my "Chapter Breakdowns" for my Sixteen Miles novel, but I forgot to save my latest and greatest version of that doc to my Yahoo Briefcase, so I didn't have a copy of it to surreptitiously type on while (pretending to) work today. So I started fiddling with my web site, making updates. Always a bad sign...

One thing I hate is not finishing things, so the fact that I had about 30 web pages still in the old format of my site was making me a bit nuts. So I did an inventory of the pages that needed updating -- most of them "excerpt" pages from various story publications -- and found I had about thirty pages to put in the new format.

I also updated my Stories page, adding links to all the cover images, goofy stuff like that. Things I'd never get around to doing if I wasn't looking to kill time...

And I had a nice little jolt of writerly nostalgia, checking out those old story publications. I've been doing this for over a decade now, and my first story publication was almost exactly ten years ago. Hard to believe. I still remember getting my two contributors' copies of the Obsidian II anthology (Elizabeth and I were freshly married, and we were over at her parents' house for dinner, and I didn't open the box until she was there to see the books). My story, "Siding the House," right there in print! (Yes, Andreas, I do indeed remember how that feels!)

And it made me think about how focused and how productive I was while I was in grad school, living and breathing fiction writing. (I was also stressed out, working part-time at the local community college and then at the local paper, getting ready to get married and trying to find a place to live, but it's easy to forget those things.)

I may have to pull out that story tonight and see if I can stand reading all the way through it. It was an experimental story (one that my thesis advisor William McCranor Henderson called a "tour de force," which always makes me smile) that I wrote based on a summer job I had with my brother-in-law Jim, and the house we worked on at the end of road in "Deep Chatham."

I was just figuring out how to write then. I still haven't figured it out, but the rush is still there. It's just been dormant for a year or so. I'm ready to feel it again. I got a taste of it last week, putting the final coat of paint on my baseball novel. Now I'm hooked again. Later!