• Mood: rejuvenated
• Music: Tom Petty - "I Won't Back Down"

Yes, I'm still alive

Sorry it's taken me so long to post. I guess Randy's death hit me harder than I thought. Basic stuff was easy to do but I sure the heck didn't feel creative. I've basically been vegetating either watching TV or skimming the internet the past couple of weeks.

Although, some very good things have happened also which are helping draw me out of the doldrums.

My father celebrated his 75th birthday the other day, we flew down to Tampa to help him celebrate that and my folk's 50th anniversary. wishweaver and the daughter unit stayed for the entire week, I had to come back to work (sigh).) Spending time with family certainly helped get my feet back underneath me.

Plus, I just spent the last couple of evenings at Shore Leave 06. Ran into klingonguy, tiggerallyn, daytonward, terri_osborne, kradical, steve_mollmann, michaelschuster, bill_leisner, Peter David, puppetmaker40, Robert Jeschonek and his lovely wife, David Mack, Josepha Sherman, Susan Schwartz and a host of other Star Trek authors and fans.

You know, conventions are fun but the bar afterward is where the real convention takes place. Got some very good advice on proposals and pitches, shared some interesting anecdotes, laughed my arse off at a lot of good (and bad) jokes and just generally relaxed and had fun. I think I needed that most of all.

Finished my edits on Chapter 23 of Harbinger and have decided to completely rewrite Chapter 24. Not edit what I had, but simply start from scratch and rewrite the chapter, so I don't keep trying to shove stuff in that I don't need. The chapter seems to have a lot of pages when I print it out, but it's only 5700+ words, which is a lot less than the 10,000 words it started out when I put the two chapters together.

With a little luck and a lot of perseverance, Harbinger will be done by 31 Aug 2006 at the latest. Hopefully much earlier, but I want time to go through it one more time with the red pen before I call it done. Oh, and you might notice a slight rise in the word count meter. Right now, it looks like this draft of Harbinger will come in a little heavier than I had hoped, but still, cutting it down from 157,000+ to 110,000 is a pretty good first swipe. I'm still hoping the August version will be under 100K. (crosses fingers)

Current Harbinger rewrite status:

93,561 / 110,000 (85.1%)