A red rose is blooming just outside my front door. Not having grown up in the southwest, I'm wowed. Roses in the yard in February. The first Christmas I lived here, one bloomed on the holiday and I was enchanted.
After a break for teaching and travel, my muse has regained full force. I'm enjoying working on F&M, which is now called T&C: ALS. I've got about 10,000 words, though the last four pages of the 44 is comprised of single-space notes that (hopefully) tell me where the story is headed.
At this point, I tend to panic that there's not enough to sustain a novel, that it'll all be written in 75 or 80 pages. It's a familiar byproduct of the fact that my rough drafts tend to be fairly bare bones (so there is much to be added), the fact that I always underestimate how many words it'll take to translate a handful of notes into a scene (sometimes a sentence equals six or more pages) and typical author insecurity. I've grown to recognize and accept it. You'd think I could also smite it from my writing life, but that may be asking too much.
In other news, GLS and I have been watching "Fantasy Island season 1" (very rhetro--women scream and faint a lot) and "Remington Steele season 2" (definitely one of the best and most underappreciated shows of its time; lots of action and charming really).
