Writing each day's words this week has been like extracting teeth using a slippy pair of old tweezers.

I had a...let's say rough...ending to last week. Several things came together at once to make work stressful, which bled into the early part of this week.

Also my wife got her second vaccine shot, which on the one hand is awesome, but on the other required her to suffer through being harassed by a cop and yelled at (in close proximity) by the staff working there. And a few hours after she got the shot, she came down with alternating chills and sweats, shaking uncontrollably. She didn't leave the bedroom for three days.

The icing on the stress cake was some maintenance that we needed done on the house, that could only be done by people entering the house. Which meant shutting off the heat, opening all the windows, and locking myself in my office while they were here.

My body, being slightly over four decades old now, doesn't react well to such compounding stresses. And it's gotten creative, so the manifestation of the stress differs every time, by type of stress and how much I'm going through.

Big speech coming up? Probably going to break out in fever blisters.

Mother-in-law had a pulmonary embolism requiring you to give up all your pets, sell your car and your house, and move back to Arkansas to take care of her? Prepare for root canal failure.

This time, I started clenching my jaw so tight that I woke myself up with muscle cramps. Felt like someone was reaching from my neck through my jaw to tug at a tooth. I got maybe four hours of sleep over two days.

So...yeah, focusing on the novel's been difficult.

It's during times like these that I'm glad I set my writing goal so low. 250 words is something I can hit in about 20 minutes, on a good day. So on days that are not good, I try to give myself an hour to hit it, dropping other housework to carve out the time. And it's working, so far.

All the same, I hope next week is more relaxing.

Coming in the midst of Black History Month, I can think of no better way to honor this President's Day than to read two essays. Both by Ta-Nehisi Coates, and both published in The Atlantic, but with completely opposed subjects.

The first essay, "My President Was Black" was published a little over four years ago, in January 2017. Obama had just left office, and Coates wrote a long, reflective essay on what the Obama Presidency had meant, both for him as a Black person, and for the country as a whole. He explored Obama's unique raising, and how that had influenced his perspective on race relations in America. He talks about how Obama achieved so much as President, despite a coalition of racist opposition that formed from his very first day in the Oval Office. And he covers how Obama disappointed him, in the way he spent more time chastising Black people for "blaming White people" and not enough time openly calling out the structures of white supremacy.

Like all of Coates' writing, it's powerful, it's though-provoking, and it's worth your time.

The second essay, "The First White President", was published just ten months after the first, in October of 2017. Even then, Coates could see clearly what many commentators could not, until after the Capitol Riot: that Donald Trump's entire political philosophy, such as it is, can be summed up as white nationalism. That Trump would not have been President at all, were it not for the racism that undergirds all politics in the United States. Trump was the ultimate expression of that racism, of that contempt for non-Whites. His racist supporters elected him as if to say, "True, a Black man can be President, after a lifetime of struggle and study. But any incompetent White man can trip into it, if he hates Blacks enough."

Everything in that essay still rings true. It's a potent reminder that Trump's grounding in racism was always there to see, if we were willing to see it. That so many people were not willing, for so long, tells us exactly how deep white nationalism's roots go in this country, and how much work we have left to do to pull it out.

This book may end up being much longer than I thought.

It's currently at 29,122 words, which is almost half of the 70K or so I thought it would end up being. The trouble is, I'm not even close to being halfway done.

The section I'm working on now, just by itself, is 16,000 words long. And it's not near done, either. I'm maybe....halfway? through the story I want to tell in this part of the book. And this section is only meant to be about one-fourth of the whole, so that would put the final word count at around 120,000 words (!)

That would make it a third longer than the longest thing I've ever written in my life.

I swear, I'm not eating up word count spinning needless metaphors or having characters do a lot of navel-gazing. It just turns out that yes, when writing a novel that moves from the lakes and forests of northern Sweden to the neverending sky of the Central Asian steppe, there's a lot of, um, ground to cover. Who knew? (Narrator: He did. Or should have).

Granted, a lot of what I'm writing now might be cut out. Some of it is no doubt redundant, or can be compacted so that the events of a few pages get covered in a few paragraphs. But even lopping off 20,000 words of filler would make this a 100K book.

100K is about 400 pages, which...well, that's a commitment, isn't it? For reader and writer alike.

So much for being done with the first draft before April. This might end up taking me the rest of the year.

Maybe it's time to look at bumping my daily word count? Trying to squeeze in a second writing session in each day? Or I could start writing on the weekends again. Just two extra days of my regular word count would be an extra 500 words a week.

Or perhaps it's best to be patient. Work on this draft during the week, like I have been, and use the weekend to edit other stories (and that previous novel, which needs a tune-up before going out).

What about you? What do you do, when a story you're working on starts to look like it'll be much longer than you anticipated?

So the Clarion West online workshop was...interesting.

The instructor, Fabio Fernandes, seems like a fantastic person, one I could easily sit and talk to for hours. I feel this because that's basically what he did for two hours: talk to us.

Well, I exaggerate. We spent the first hour hearing having everyone in the class introduce themselves.

The second hour -- and beyond? he wasn't done when I had to hop off to get back to work -- was him telling us stories, making reading recommendations, and...that's it. No real writing advice, other than to write what we want to write, rather than what we know.

But his personal stories were fascinating and eye-opening. Like the one where he picked apart a scene in Ian McDonald's Brazil (which he translated into Portuguese) involving a group of black men and a white woman, talking us through how the race relations displayed in that scene were not Brazilian, but American. Or how he's considered to be White in Brazil, but in the US or UK he's Latino, but only to people in those countries who think of themselves as White, because to other South Americans, Brazilians are not Latino, because they don't speak Spanish!

And he did in general give me confidence (permission?) to write about cultures other than my own. He said we have to find things in our experience that can bridge the gap between the culture we grew up in and the culture we want to write about. And to remember that we are all both insiders and outsiders: insiders for our native culture, outsiders to everyone else (and vice-versa).

So I guess my experience was positive? If a bit less focused than I'd like. And less organized; they said they'd have the recording link sent to us, but it's been over a week now and so far, nothing.

So I'm not sure I'm going to sign up for any more of the Clarion West online courses. Apparently fifteen minutes is more than enough to get some excellent feedback on a story draft, but not even two hours is enough time in which to give some general writing advice and techniques.

In conclusion: I really cannot wait for the pandemic to end, so we can go back to learning and sharing in person.

I'm not sure I could keep doing this writing thing, without the support of my friends.

Just this week, one of them pinged me, to ask if I'd heard anything back about a short story he'd recently beta-read for me. And I felt a prick of shame, because I hadn't submitted the story, even after incorporating his feedback, and declaring that was my intent.

But that shame is becoming action. I've promised to send it off this weekend, and asked him to penalize me (via drinks owed) if I don't.

The funny thing is, I love the short story in question. I think it's the best thing I've written to date. But it's already been rejected, in previous draft form, by half a dozen different magazines. So I'm terrified of submitting it again, and having it rejected again...and then discovering later that there's one small thing missing that makes it perfect.

Because I only get one shot at each magazine for this story. They all have policies in place that won't let you re-submit a story, even after editing. Which is their right, of course; they get inundated with submissions as it is. But it raises the stakes for me. Makes me hesitate to send the story in. Because being told "this isn't good enough" is fine with me. It's not being able to fix it and then try again.

In an odd way, I feel like I'm failing the story when it gets rejected. Like it's my job to make it the best it can be, and then go find it a home. And when I edit after getting rejections, and those edits make the story shine brighter, I feel like I let the story down by sending it out too soon.

And yet, how would I know to keep editing, without those rejections?

All of which is to say: I've got another short story I'm sending out this weekend. And another friend to feel thankful for.

Apex Magazine is back!

Apex went on what looked like permanent hiatus while editor-in-chief Jason Sizemore dealt with multiple surgeries for serious health issues (see his editorial in this month's magazine). But he's thankfully recovered, and after a successful Kickstarter, he's re-assembled the Apex editing team, and resurrected the magazine!

Issue 121, then, is their first new issue in almost two years. It's a double issue, as all of them will be from now on, released every two months. You can grab your own copy here

So let's dive in! (no spoilers, I promise).

Root Rot, by Fargo Tbakh

Jesus, this story.

Reading it is disorienting at first. There's a good reason for that, for why the narrator's voice seems jumbled and confused. But as I read, more and more pieces fell into place, until the very last scene broke my heart.

I wish I could write something this powerful. This moving. An inspiration, and a bar to shoot for.

Your Own Undoing, by P H Lee

Second person, represent!

I usually hate stories told in the second person. All those "You"s feel like commands, and I instinctually kick back against those, and out of the story.

Not so in this case. Lee's story wove a meta fairy tale around me, a story that was itself an illustration of the conflict at its heart.

If it sounds too clever for its own good, don't be put off. It's not. It's a fantastic story, first and foremost. It's only afterward, when thinking about it, that its clever structure reveals its shape. Just amazing.

Love, That Hungry Thing, by Cassandra Khaw

This one....this one did feel too clever for its own good, for me.

Not in structure, but in the way it leans so far into the modern (well, post-2004) tendency to leave readers out on a limb. Being confused can work -- see the first story, above -- for a while, but I (being very careful here, as I know not everyone shares my tastes) tend to get very frustrated if there's no payoff at the end.

And there's no payoff in this story, for me. In fact, there's very little action at all, or even dialog.

A lot of beautiful description, though. Evocative words and phrases that promise glittering insight into this future, but then never cohere into a stable image. Nothing falls into place. It's an exquisitely described place, though.

Mr Death, by Alix E Harrow

My favorite of the bunch.

I don't want to say too much, lest I give anything away. Let me just say that this is what I wish the movie Soul had been. Read it. You won't regret it.

The Niddah, by Elana Gomel

A short story about a global pandemic. Yes, really.

Grey Skies, Red Wings, Blue Lips, Black Hearts, by Merc Fenn Wolfmoor

Had an allergic reaction to this one. Something about another story that drops the reader into a confused space, with no explanation, and calls its main environment "The City."

All I Want for Christmas, by Charles Payseur

Short, powerful flash piece. Made me shudder.

My wife and I bought the house we're living in almost exactly one year ago. We closed (finished all the paperwork) on January 31, 2020. Started packing on February 1. And moved in February 2nd.

Anticipating all the get-togethers we'd host in the new place, with all that extra yard space.

During the move, I cut my head, bad enough to think I might need stitches. I drove the twenty minutes to the nearest Urgent Care clinic, only to be turned away. It was Super Bowl weekend, you see, and everyone was getting in to see the doc before the game started. I could wait two to three hours, or I could go home. I chose to go home, and resume moving (suitably bandaged, of course).

No masks. No fear of other people. No hesitancy in going out for fear of catching something.

Three weeks later, having finally decided where the furniture would go, we held a house-warming party. Invited friends from all over town, got a taco truck to cater lunch, filled half a dozen metal troughs with ice and beer. We thought it'd be maybe a few hours, ended up lasting all afternoon and into the night. I made a toast for the late-night crowd using Stone's Vertical Epic re-release to talk about every significant year in our two-decades-long marriage. We had a blast.

It was the last party any of us have been to since then.

We've been lucky this year. Neither of us has caught Covid-19. We've both been able to work from home, from this home, during the pandemic. My wife took over the third (guest) bedroom as her office, a bedroom we didn't have at the old place. We had a garage big enough to hold all the boxes for all the deliveries we started getting. We had a kitchen big enough for us to start cooking all of our own meals. A yard just big enough for our pups to go out and get some exercise, since they couldn't go to the park anymore.

I feel fortunate and grateful, and a large part of it is due to this house. So thank you, house, for being there for us.

For not having any roof leaks, other than the small one in the garage that we won't talk about.

For being insulated enough so that we can both be on Zoom calls in different rooms and not hear each other.

For not having any weird smells.

For being rock-solid enough to keep on trucking with your older appliances and bathroom fixtures, and yet flexible enough to accept upgrades when we could get them done (safely).

For having lots of sun for the pups to lay in (they really do seem to be solar-powered).

For being well-ventilated enough when we needed you to be, and tightly sealed when we needed that, too.

For being just big enough for the two of us, but not so big that we couldn't keep you clean (and thanks for understanding when we felt a little too overwhelmed to scrub the bathtub that other week).

But most of all, thanks for being ready for us. And for our company, in the short time period when we could have it. I hope we can have some more company, too, in the near future.

'Tis the season of the writer's conference.

Had the Apex Magazine 15-minute workshop on Monday, which may have permanently changed the way I approach my writing. I'm on the alert now for some of my bad writing habits, and am currently going through two different stories to eliminate them.

Today, I'm attending Clarion West's workshop on How to Write Science Fiction in a Post-Colonial World, part of their series of single-day online workshops. Similar to the Apex one, I'm not sure what to expect. I hope it'll help me with the novel I'm writing right now (and future works), where one of my main characters is from the steppes of Central Asia. I don't want to appropriate anyone's culture, but I do want to showcase the diversity of the world, particularly in the time period I'm setting this story (the 18th century), which American writers tend to whitewash.

And I'm considering signing up for the Southern California Writers Conference, which is in two weeks (and also online). It was the first writers conference I attended, back when we could safely congregate inside. I got a lot out of it: I wrote two stories, got tips on plot structure, and met some great people. And now one of my fellow Writers Coffeehouse alumni (Dennis K Crosby) is one of the special guest speakers! I could use that kind of shot in the arm again (vaccine connotation very much intended).

Not that I'm currently having trouble producing, thank goodness. Novel's at 26,099 words. I've patched up the seams in the scenes I've written so far, and moved on to the "meat" of the chapter: the POV character's close encounter with a dragon.

I'm still writing it in bits and pieces, moving up and down the page as ideas come to me and I figure things out. It keeps me from getting hung up on any one part of the book, or worry too much about how I'm going to get from Point A to Point B. I can always make something up :)

And after the Apex workshop, and re-examining some of my past short stories, I'm starting to think about the connective tissue between scenes differently. As in, maybe I don't need it, after all.

That's not quite right. I think I, the writer, need it. I need to have written it, in order to fully understand my story. But I don't necessarily need to show that to the reader.

Same thing with exposition. I need to know everything about my world. I need to know what the sunlight looks like in springtime. I need to know how the birds sound in the morning. I need to know which cars are driving by at the end of the day (if this world has cars). So these are all things I need to set down, to fix in my mind by fixing them in text. But I don't need to relay those details to the reader, unless something stands out to the POV character, and affects their decisions.

It's advice I've heard before, but not really felt in my bones until now. I'd always assumed my readers were lost unless I held their hand, and relied on my brevity to make the explanations palatable.

I think now I can trust the reader more. I still plan to write all the exposition, so I have it straight in my own head. But when editing I'm going to start taking it all out, and only putting things back in if a beta reader complains of being lost. Otherwise, I'm going to lean on actions and dialog to convey everything.

What about you? Is there a piece of classic writing advice that took you a while to fully understand?

Cobra Kai has no right to exist, let alone be good.

It's a spin-off of a move franchise whose third installment limped out of theaters thirty years ago. It's centered on the villains of those movies. And because Pat Morita has passed on (RIP), it can't include most people's favorite character.

How did this happen? Who greenlit this? Who had the audacity to even suggest it?

And how the hell is it this friggin' good?

Because seriously, if you put the first two seasons of The Mandalorian up against the first two seasons of Cobra Kai, Cobra Kai is the better show, hands down. It's got funnier lines, better acting, and better characters.

Cobra Kai's surprisingly deep, willing to show us good and bad sides of all the characters. As a result, for its first two seasons, there's no real villain. There's conflict, sure, and tension, hell yes, but you can sympathize with everyone. Root for everyone. It's been a long time since I've seen a TV show where I liked every character, but Cobra Kai pulls it off.

...for two seasons. The third season drops the "no villain" posture, and switches genres entirely. From a grounded, complex show, exploring the adult lives of Johnny Lawrence and Daniel LaRusso while also examining how their rivalry impacts their kids' lives, Cobra Kai switches over to a YA love-triangle plot in a universe with martial-arts movie logic. Which is fine, as things go, but isn't nearly as interesting, and is a jarring switch, after two seasons of being a rather different show. You'll want to see all three seasons (season two ends on a bit of a cliffhanger), but be prepared for the tonal shift.

Still, if you liked the Karate Kid movies, I highly recommend Cobra Kai. It's clearly made by people who love those movies, who could recite them line by line, because of the way they weave the backstory from the trilogy into the plot of the show. They even manage to make good plot fodder out of the third movie, which is something I didn't think was possible!

They took their love, and built this beautiful show, that for its first two seasons stomps everything else I've seen recently.

Apex Magazine is back from hiatus! One of my favorite short fiction magazines for years, Apex has consistently had fantastic stories, as shown by the many (many) awardsthey've won or been nominated for over the years.

I'm reading through their first new issue now. I'll post a full review later, but I can already tell they've retained the high bar for quality they've always had. The very first story, out of the gate, left me devastated, in a good way: just profoundly moving.

So when they announced they were doing a 15-minute online writing workshop with author Tim Waggoner, I leaped to sign up.

Sure, I had some skepticism. Most of the past workshops I've been to have been at least an hour, and even that felt short. How much could we cover in just fifteen minutes?

It turns out you can cover basically everything you need to cover, to dissect why a piece of short fiction isn't working.

I sent in the first six pages of a horror story I have that I like, that I've edited multiple times, but that also keeps getting rejected. I assumed it was a problem with the story, but I was having trouble seeing it.

Tim had no such problems. In just fifteen minutes over voice chat, he went right to the heart of the problem with my story: the motivation for my protagonist is too impersonal. Then he broke down some issues with my style -- too many short paragraphs, too much exposition up front -- that I realized are habits I need to break, because other readers have mentioned them before for other pieces (different readers saw different issues. Tim saw them all).

I wasn't all criticism, though. He also gave me techniques to use to prevent making these same mistakes again. Such as keeping a separate document open for exposition, writing it there and only there during the first draft, and then coming back and pulling from that doc while editing, inserting only what the reader has to know, and then only when they need to know it. Or combining the first few pages into a single paragraph, then breaking it up during a read-through, to end up with more natural-feeling paragraphs.

He was spot on, in everything he said. I already started re-drafting the story based on his feedback. Not only that, but I'm also editing a second story with his feedback in mind; when re-reading it after the workshop, several of those same problems leaped out at me.

Many thanks to Apex Magazine for organizing the workshop, and to Tim Waggoner for running it! I learned a lot in a short amount of time, and I'm very grateful.

It feels good to have a competent President again. A President with some dignity, who doesn't spend his time tweeting out misinformation. Whose Press Secretary thanked reporters after her first press briefing, who doesn't see journalists as the enemy. A President who made news this week because of the raft of actions he took to kick off a national response to the coronavirus pandemic, not the lies he told.

The day after the inauguration, I sat down to write after a long day at work, and when I looked up I'd written twice my daily word count, smooth as butter.

I could get used to this. I want to get used to this. Not in the sense of taking it for granted, but in the sense of it happening, over and over and over again.

There's much to be done, politically. Too many Americans are locked up in prisons. Too many Americans fear the loss of their job so much they're willing to endure urinating into bottles and absurdly low wages, while their bosses complain about not knowing how to spend all the money they're making.

But it'll be easier, collectively, to tackle such things, if we don't all have to worry about the President, too, coming after us. If we have the headspace to write, and call, and paint, and march, and sing, and petition, without wondering, every day, which shoe the executive is going to drop on us that day. What painstaking progress the administration rolled back with callous ease this morning.

It'll be good to feel like we have an ally in the White House. Not perfect, by any means. But not actively trying to set us back.

Novel's at 24,580 words. More by the end of the day, since I haven't yet done my daily words. Back to the rhythm of 2,000 words per week.

I'm at the point where I'm stitching together the pieces I've written for the current sequence, before pressing on. I'm having to shift some paragraphs around, moving them either earlier in the chapter or later, so I can keep them without interrupting the flow of things.

I can already see parts I'm going to have to revise. Conversations that don't go anywhere (currently), descriptions of daily life that will need to be rewritten according to the research I'm doing.

I'm...uncertain, whether to fix those, or just press on. The advice I've gotten from the Writer's Coffeehouse says to move on, to just make a note of it, so it'll be easy to come back to, but to keep forward momentum going. Finish the draft, then go back and patch things up.

And it's good advice! Only...if I already know how things need to change, shouldn't I change them? Or worse, if I know things need to change, but I'm not sure exactly how, isn't it better to find out the more stable form for them now, so I can keep writing the book with that in mind?

I suppose the advice is meant to keep me from getting bogged down in revisions, instead of finishing out the draft. And I definitely do not want to do that. And it'll probably be easier to make the changes I need once the book's done, and I can see the whole story, rather than now, when I'm still mapping it out.

So I suppose I will press on. Still going to make notes about revisions to the scenes, though, so I don't forget them when it's time to edit.

But to have something to edit, I've got to finish this draft.
Onward!

These past four years have been a waking nightmare. Every day, it's been a barrage of lies, mismanagement, and neglect from a President with no previous governmental experience, no redeeming qualities, and no sense of duty.

2020 brought everything bad about the modern GOP right out into the open. They're willing to let 400,000 Americans die rather than wear a piece of cloth on their face. They're more interested in holding onto power than continuing our democracy. And they're willing to commit sedition to get their way.

Biden and Harris will have a lot of work to do, just repairing the damage the GOP has done. But beyond that, they've got to contend with all the things they ignored, from the pandemic to foreign interference in our elections to the right-wing terrorists who attacked the Capitol.

And to be fair, some of the issues we need them to put a spotlight on are things we as a country have ignored for too long: racial justice, climate change, universal health care. The pandemic exposed how weak our institutions have really become, because we've left folks behind. That needs to stop, if we are to indeed build back better.

It's a heavy task, but I have hope. Hope because the need for these things is out in the open, plain as the hospitals that have been overwhelmed, plain as videos of police beating up protestors and journalists, plain as the police shooting of a Black man in broad daylight as he was getting calmly into his car with his kids.

The Biden/Harris Administration isn't an excuse for us to go back to sleep. To imagine ourselves waking up in a better country.

It's a chance for us to get to work.

I'll be watching the swearing-in ceremony today, live. You can view it here, on the Biden/Harris inaugural page, or on Youtube

I realized, this morning, that I'd never read Dr King's Letter from Birmingham Jail. So I found this copy online, and read it straight through.

It took only twenty minutes to read. But in that one letter, King evokes philosophers and thinkers from Martin Buber to St Augustine to Thomas Jefferson, laying out the justice of his cause and defending nonviolent direct action. It's a powerful, compelling, argument.

Reading the letter, it struck me how little has changed, in how police still react with violence to Black people who are nonviolently seeking justice. In King's day, they attacked marchers with dogs, billy clubs, and fire hoses. In ours, they do it with tear gas, rubber bullets, and tasers. But the demands are the same, and the violence committed in the name of upholding racist power is the same.

I urge you, if you haven't before, to read the letter. And as we speed away from 2020 and into 2021, let's remember Black people were murdered by police in 2019, and they will continue to be murdered by police in the new year, until racist power is broken, and justice is granted to all those Black families that have been told to "wait."

What a week, eh?

Trump's been impeached for a second time (finally). The insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol are being rounded up (thank goodness). And tech platforms are waking up to their complicity in the planning of the attack, and as a result, dropping right wing extremists so fast it reveals how much they were dragging their feet about it before.

Not that my family back home believes any of that, of course. I mean that quite literally: they don't think Trump has been impeached, they think "antifa" (insert eyeroll here) caused the riot, they think the First Amendment requires their favorite BBS to let them post anything they want.

It's...amazing, to me, to see the people that wrap themselves in the flag and "Blue Lives Matter" defend folks that invaded the Capitol with the intent of halting a Constitutional process (and perhaps grabbing a hostage or two) and beat the cops that tried to stop them.

What happened to the party of law and order? The party of civics, of wear-your-tie-to-school and don't-you-know-how-the-government-works, hippie? Was it always a smokescreen?

So...yeah, I've been a little distracted. Writing-wise.

But I'm still hitting my 250-words-a-day target! Not always when I'm supposed to (in the morning), and not always in a single session (10 minutes at lunch, 20 minutes after work, 15 minutes before bed...), but I am getting them done, every day.

Not much more than the minimum, I'm afraid. Which is why the novel's only at 22,894 words. But it's progress, all the same.

Taking weekends off is still helping. Relives the pressure for a bit. Lets me do some of the research I need to do to properly write the section I'm on, which can soak up a lot of time (can you believe it's hard to find an English-language book on 17th-century Central Asian history and culture?). Also gives me a chance to reflect on where things stand so far, and where I'd like to novel to go next.

What about you? How is your writing going, two weeks into the new year?

Ye gods, it has been hard for me to avoid spoilers for Mandalorian Season 2. Even though I deliberately avoided every article, every review, still things would slide by on my Twitter feed, and then boom spoiled.

So two of the "biggest" reveals -- well, okay, three -- were basically spoiled for me before I even started rewatching Season One.

I...well, I hate that, so I'm going to be very careful here. The first part of my review will be completely spoiler-free, promise.

The second part will have spoilers, but I'll label it in huge header-style letters first, so if you haven't seen Season Two yet, you can stop before you get there.

Ready?

Let's go.

Non-Spoiler Review

Season Two is a huge improvement on Season One.

In Season One, the episodes were very much disconnected, both tonally and plot-wise. It felt like the kind of show that a network that 20 years ago would have been shown out of order on a network, because they thought no one would notice.

Season Two finally gets its plot arc together. Each episode flows naturally from the last, and builds on it, till the final episode feels inevitable, instead of weirdly tacked-on.

As a result, every single part of the writing is stronger. The dialog is better, because it has a purpose. The individual plots are better, because they're not mucking about, they're building to a conclusion. And we get to see more character moments from Mando, learning more about him, and how he changes over the course of the Season.

Basically, everything that was missing from Season One is finally in place.

And thankfully, they don't throw out the elements from Season One that mostly worked. They revise them a little, perhaps, but amidst the new cameos and characters, it felt good to see them tying into locations and events from Season One. It made the whole thing seem more grounded, more real.

So what's not to like?

Well, I'll save the details for the spoiler section, but basically they still don't know what to do with Moff Gideon other than have him be SO EVIL, LIKE REALLY EVIL, HE WEARS BLACK AND EVERYTHING CAN'T YOU SEE HE'S EVIL?!!

And they can't seem to think of a good name for something Imperial other than to call it "Dark," which makes me think they drank the Dark Kool-Aid in their Dark Treehouse while wearing their Dark Hat (and listening to Dark Music) just a little too much. It's not scary at this point, it just sounds uncreative (and a little racist, to be honest).

Finally, after all the buildup I heard online about the last episode, it was a complete and total letdown. Plot-wise, character-wise, and ending-wise. Just meh.

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

This next part of the review has spoilers! If you don't want 'em, skip out now. I'm going to give you till the count of 3.

1...

2....

3.

"Dark" Troopers? Seriously? That was the best name they could come up with? The scariest name?

And what's scary about them? They have better armor than stormtroopers, they're kind of strong? I mean, really, how are they a frightening force?

They're obviously there so that the only thing that can rescue our heroes from them is a Jedi. Which is...so frustrating, and feels like a lost of wasted potential.

Ditto Moff Gideon. "I'm done with the Child, you can have him"? And then Mando just believes him? Mando, who a few episode earlier we saw shoot an enemy that claimed to be disarming? Mando, who we've seen call in a New Republic hit on an entire base? That Mando?

I don't buy it, not one bit.

I feel sorry for Moff Gideon. They have him strutting around in that ridiculous armor, which he has no business wearing in the first place, spouting villain dialog which goes nowhere and does nothing.

Dear god, I just remembered: "Dark Saber." Jesus Wept. What a horrible name for a MacGuffin.

And then Luke shows up, and he doesn't sit down to chat, doesn't explain anything, just this dude in black comes up and says "Give me the child," and Mando just hands him over, no problem.

Hahaha, nope.

They've taken the ship. Why not have Luke stay for a bit? Discuss his plans? Get to know the Child?

Oh, it's because de-aging CGI is expensive? Well, gosh, maybe they should have had some other Jedi come in and take the Child.

Like, oh....How about Qi'Ra? No computer-based aging required. We know she was working with Darth Maul, so her being a trained Sith is possible. And she can pretend to be a good person, at first, who's willing to take the Child.

But having someone actually evil, actually, interestingly evil, take the Child gives us a plot engine for Season 3, and a cliffhanger for all of us who've seen Solo.

Instead, Luke's flown in, taken the Child, end of story. What's left to do?

Oh, the whole rule over Mandalore thing? That's so obviously a fake problem, I don't...I don't really care.

I might care, if Mando had to try to protect the Child while getting involved in a plan to retake Mandalore and put what's-her-name on the throne. That'd be interesting.

But that ship's sailed, hasn't it?

So for me, the final episode was just a big letdown. Going out with not a bang, not even a whimper, but more of a sigh.

I think the first five episodes of the Season are fantastic. But things start to wobble in Episode Six (it was good to see Boba Fett kicking ass, sure, but did Mando really need to throw himself at that force field three effing times?), and then completely come apart in the finale.

I don't know if I'll watch a Season Three. Having established their show once, and fixed it the second time, then thrown it all away, what's there to draw me back?

My family and I have disagreed on politics for a long time. I turned left even before going to college, rejecting the conservatism I was raised in.

Their conservative beliefs -- shared by most people where I grew up, in West Texas -- seemed hollow and hypocritical to me. They talked a big game about freedom, but sent me to the principal's office for daring to wear a hat to school (only girls were allowed to wear hats in those hallowed halls, I was told). They talked up their faith, and turning the other cheek, but it was me that was supposed to turn that cheek, not them, as they let their sons bully me between classes. And they wrapped themselves in patriotism, but only for "real Americans," like them, not liberals or Californians or anyone living back East...or me.

There was no place for me, in their America. Except at the bottom of the ladder, to be kicked and laughed at. Open season on nerds.

So I left Texas, and I left their beliefs behind. I didn't give up on my family, though. I argued with them, often and vigorously. They were amused at my liberalism, I'm sure -- there's a smirk a right-wing person gets when they feel a leftie is talking out of their ass -- but I was sincere.

And they argued back! We had good discussions, for many years. They pushed me to refine my thinking, and I used to think I was helping them, too, to see the other side of the argument. We didn't have much in common, anymore, but we had good, old-fashioned, no-holds-barred, debates. All in good faith, and with love.

But we don't -- we can't -- argue like that anymore.

Things started changing during Obama's presidency. I didn't notice it at the time, but looking back a pivotal moment was when my older sister, in all seriousness, sat down across from me after dinner one night for a chat.

"I need to ask you about something," she said. "You're pretty up on things, you know what's going on."

I shrugged. "Sure, what's up?"

"I know the IRS is building camps out here, in the desert, to round up people with guns, and you know, conservatives. So what I do, when they come for me?"

...and I was speechless.

I mean, I said all the things I thought were right: The camps weren't real, no one was coming for her or her guns (which she doesn't own) or conservatives in general. That President Obama had no such plans, and would never do such a thing.

She listened, and she nodded. And I thought she believed me, and felt better.

But now...Now I'm not so sure. When my family's constantly posting things about how the election was stolen and the Democrats are all Muslims that want to put Oklahoma under Shari'a Law and Black Lives Matter protestors burned down the entire city of Portland in a single day. I feel like that conversation was my first glimpse that something was wrong, that my family was slipping from conservative to right-wing, and losing their grip on reality.

Could I have done something, said something, back then, to keep that from happening? Could I have reached out more, found conservative but reality-based news sources to help them feel comfortable staying with us in the real world?

Because I can't have arguments with them anymore. I have to spend all my time trying to convince them that these things they fear are simply not true.

And I can't get through to them. No matter how many news articles I link. They're "fake news" from the "mainstream media," and so can't be trusted.

Not only can't be trusted, but challenging their reality this way is taken as a personal attack. They're not "lies" they're "conservative facts." I can't...I don't know how to respond to that.

And all the time I spend fact-checking, they're continuing to like and re-post articles spreading hate and fear about liberals, about BLM, about...well, about me. Not directly, but people like me. My friends. My neighbors. Our fellow citizens.

I'm...angry, sure, but also sad. Because I've lost something that was very important to me. I've lost my debate partners. But more, I've lost my family.

And I don't know how to get them back.

Oof, 2021 started out well, didn't it?

I mean even with the spike in Covid-19 patients, and the continued lies spread by the President and his allies about the election, I had a feeling on New Year's Day that we'd escaped the awfulness of 2020. That we'd turned a corner, the case numbers would be coming down soon, President Biden would be in office in just a few weeks, and we could start the work of rebuilding everything the Republican Party has destroyed over the last four years.

Even the Georgia elections (!) gave me hope. My fellow citizens in GA turned out in such numbers that they put the two Dems over the top, putting an end to the use of the Senate as just a roadblock to legislation. Exciting times!

And then came the coup.

I know, I know. Attempted coup. Or riot. Maybe insurrection, if you're a journalist and you're feeling spicy.

And suddenly all of the mental habits I'd tried to shed from 2020 were back. Reflexively checking the news every five minutes. Doomscrolling on Twitter. Cognitive dissonance from looking out my window, seeing a bright January day in SoCal, and then hearing reports of shots fired in the Capitol building.

Texting friends living in DC, to see if they're okay during the madness.

I called my brand-new freshman-clean House Rep yesterday, not just to urge her to impeach Trump, but also to check in and see if they were safe.

What a country.

Difficult to think in such times. Difficult to write.

But so far, I've managed to do it. Each day, closed out Twitter, stared at the screen, reading over the previous days' work until I sink back into the story.

And it is sinking. It is an escape, for me. A needed one, in this case.

So I've pushed the novel up to 21,348 words. I'm almost done with the scenes I've been working on, patch-work-style. I move up and down the page, writing sections as they come to me, completely out of order. I leave visual gaps in-between them, extra newlines, to show that these are fragments. Then go back in and fill the gaps later, stitching together all the pieces until they read like a continuous whole.

It's not how I've written other novels. Not even how I usually write stories, either. But it's the only thing that's working for me, right now. So I'm using it.

Hope wherever you are, that you're safe, that you can still put yourself in the headspace to write, even if it's just a few words.

Hang in there.

In preparation for diving into Season Two, I've been rewatching The Mandalorian's first season. And there's a lot of things I'm noticing, good and bad, about the series that I didn't pick up on before.

Warning: Slight spoilers for Season One below.

The Good

I still love the decision they made to set it just after the original films. Both aesthetically, because it lets them recreate the look of those movies (which I’m still a sucker for), and story-wise, because it gives them a lot of room to play, with the Empire crumbling (but not gone) and the New Republic still finding its feet (along with everyone else). Lots of possibilities.

And seeing characters that got short shift in the originals, like the IG unit and the Ugnaught, finally get their due as fully realized people, warms the heart of this old fanboy.

The special effects are simply spectacular. You can tell they poured a lot of money and time into them. And it's not just The Child, either; the ships, the creatures, everything looks as good as (or better) than anything made for the movies.

Ditto the music. I love the theme: So sparse but memorable, really sets the Western tone for the series. They keep the music low-key or gone for most of the show, which I appreciate. It's there to heighten some moments, but otherwise they know they don't need it.

And sometimes -- not often enough, but sometimes -- the dialog crackles. I think the scene between the two speeder troopers at the open of Episode Eight is one of the funniest, most re-watchable scenes in a modern Star Wars production.

The Bad

Far too often, though, the dialog is clunky. There's too many times where characters point out something completely obvious, like when they reach the lava river in Episode Eight and someone actually says "That's a river of lava."

Or the dialog simply makes no sense at all. Like when The Child approaches Greef, hand out, intending to heal him, and Greef cries out "It's going to eat me!" Which is laughably bad. Nothing Greef's seen in his time with The Child could make him think that tiny thing was going to try to eat him. It's just ridiculous.

Often they recap something that the audience has heard already, sometimes twice. And I don't mean the whole "I don't take off my mask thing," which they obsess over for some reason. I mean actual plot recaps they have two characters give each other after we (the audience) have just seen it happen in that same episode. There's a scene in Episode Seven where Cara and The Mandalorian recap not just the situation he's in (which we know because we saw him get it in) but also why he brought her along (which we know because we saw him recruit her).

It's not just the fact that these recaps don't make any sense in-story (because they're often between characters that know the things they're rehashing). They're also wasted time, in a show that doesn't have time to waste (only 8 episodes for season one, each only about 30 minutes long).

Setting aside the dialog, I also wonder if The Mandalorian changes at all over the course of the season? His circumstances change, sure, but he starts out a pragmatically ruthless, honor-among-thieves type, and ends the season as...a pragmatically ruthless, honor-among-thieves type. There's no grand moment when he realizes something about himself that he wants to change, and makes a conscious decision to change it. The droid IG-11 has more of a character arc then he does!

The Ugly

There's so many parts of this season that make me cringe.

Basically all of Episode Six ("The Prisoner"). For that episode to work at all, we need the other crew members to look and feel like a tight-knit group, moving and working like a well-oiled machine. That way, when they betray Mando, we'll actually be worried about him being able to take them down. As it is, he's the only member of the crew to display any competence at all, so it's no surprise when he comes out on top.

The less said about Xi'an's "I'm a bad girl and I'm into you, Mando" shtick, the better.

They really obsess over his helmet wearing. Too much. In a galaxy filled with all kinds of intelligent creatures, from Calamari to Tusken to Jawas, is it really so odd for someone to always wear a helmet? Re-watching it, I was struck by how much I really don't care what Mando's face looks like. I care about other things, like "Why did you leave The Child alone in an empty ship in the middle of Mos Eisley?"

And the whole sequence with Moff Gideon...Ooof. Where to begin.

Let's start with why he doesn't already know the troopers have The Child? The speeder guards obviously know The Child's important. They have working comms. Why don't they just tell Gideon? Because that'd eliminate the need for his "I'll keep them alive to drag out this episode" speech.

Then he commits the sin of actually saying they know what the e-web thingy is, and then goes on to explain it to them anyway.

Gives them "till nightfall" to talk things over, as if he cares about their lives...When, if he did care about them, he wouldn't have sprayed blaster shots into the bar in the first place.

It's all such mustache-twirling villain stuff, I can't help but roll my eyes.

Which is a shame, because the actor, and the character, is fantastic. An Imperial Moff, clinging to some semblance of control in his corner of space, defying the fall of the Empire. Great stuff.

I just wish they gave him something to do other than posture and bluster. Oh, and pilot a Tie-Fighter, something an administrator who came up in the intelligence services has no business doing. It's kind of like if the Governor of Montana used to be in the CIA in the 1970's but then decided to hop into an F-22 for funsies. Just...why??

Conclusion

On first watch, I felt The Mandalorian was a solid B-movie in TV show form, a nice little Western story told on the edges of the Star Wars universe.

After re-watching it, I still think that, but I'm more frustrated than before at the mistakes the series makes.

It's hard not to compare it to Firefly, another Western-in-Space story that had a pulpy feel. The Mandalorian doesn't come off well in that comparison: It stumbles out of the gate, with clunky dialog and "villains" that don't act in ways that make sense.

Here's hoping Season Two is better!

Feels a little silly to be setting any goals for 2021, to be honest. If 2020 taught me anything, it's that plans can become meaningless fairly quickly.

But I live in hope, and so I want to enter the year, like I always try to, with some goals in mind for my writing.

Goals from 2020: How did I do?

First, a look back at how I did on 2020's writing goals:

Write four short stories

Hahaha, nope. Not even close.

The story I started just after setting that goal? The one I'd been chewing on for a while, and wanted to just get started on? That's the novel I'm currently writing.

It didn't take long for me to look at the outline I'd produced for the "short story" and realize it was really a novel. And since, at the time, I was already working on one novel, I shelved it. Came back to it only this November, for NaNoWriMo, and I've been chugging along ever since.

I did start a new short story, that will actually be short, but hit delays because I tried to follow the advice of Story Genius, which ran me right into a wall of writer's block. Had to hit pause that one, too, so I could start working on the current novel.

I did get one story edited, and by edited I mean "wrote an entirely new back half of the story, doubling its word count." Said story is now so long it's too long for many of the markets I'd like to sell it to. So maybe I can get credit for that one?

Finish the current novel

This one I did do, sort of.

"Current novel" here meant Prison Fall, the book I was working on most of this year (before the new novel). The official goal was to have it done, completely, ready to go to agents, etc. And it is done, in the sense that I've done multiple drafts now, one of which involved basically rewriting most of it, and I've done multiple editing passes since then to clean up the prose and eliminate inconsistencies.

The feedback I've gotten from beta readers, though, has revealed some things I want to fix before sending it out. So it's not all done, in that sense. But close enough.

Post more to the blog

This one's also a mixed bag. I started out well, conducting interviews with local writers and posting them here on the blog. I think I got three months in before the pandemic crashed down on me, wiping out the mental headroom I had to work on those.

Ditto my book and movie reviews. I had a good run of keeping up with them, but eventually ran out of steam, over the summer this time. Began to interfere with my enjoyment of the books, where I felt I had to keep notes on every little thing as I went through. Not to mention my motivation for writing them up fell away. So I stopped.

So this one's a partial success.

Goals for 2021

Oof, here we go. Is it okay if I just call a do-over on 2020, and copy those goals? No? Fine, whatever.

Finish first draft of The Last Dragon

Slow and steady. I want to keep working on the novel I started back in NaNoWriMo, and finish its first draft before the end of the year. It'll be an ugly draft. It'll have mistakes and inconsistencies and historical inaccuracies everywhere. But I can't fix it if it doesn't exist, so I want to finish it out.

Finish edits to Prison Fall

One last pass to do the touch-ups from my beta readers.

Finish The Harvest

This is the short story I was working on in October. I like the story, and I want to finish it. By finished, I mean, drafted, edited, beta read, the whole shebang.

For once, I'd like to do the full cycle of drafts on a short story before sending it anywhere. In the past, I've gone through a few drafts, then started sending it out, sometimes before beta readers get to it. As a result, the story I submit to later markets is always stronger (and very different) from previous ones.

I'd like to have submit the strongest version from the start, this time. If that means it doesn't get submitted anywhere this year, I'll have to live with that.

Post three times a week

Yes, fine, I'm copying this one over from last year. It's still a good goal.

Stretch Goal: Submit Prison Fall to agents

If I don't finish the edits till the end of the year, this'll have to wait till 2022. But it'd be nice to have this actually out the door, accumulating rejection slips, before the year's out.

Wrap-Up

So there they are: my 2021 goals.

I'm setting the bar lower this time around, because I think the pandemic is not going away in the US anytime soon. Even with the vaccine, we're seeing folks -- medical front-line workers, even! -- refuse to take it, all while hospitals are full and mask-wearing is maybe at 50%. It's going to be a long hard road to herd immunity.

What about you? What writing goals are you setting for the new year?

We made it to a new year!

In the past, I've taken that for granted. One year rolled into the next, I got older, and the world kept turning.

Not this year. This year, reaching January feels like an escape, like ducking under a closing door just before it seals itself shut.

So a sincere Happy New Year to us all!

Novel's at 19,864 words. I'm still butt in chair every morning, forcing myself to stay there until I hit my word count goal. Some mornings it's easier, some it's harder, but...I'm always making progress.

I'm actually starting to run out of runway on the research I've already done about the setting. Which means I'm having to make more things up out of thin air, and thus getting more things wrong. I've already had to revise a few scenes based on new reading I've done. That'll happen more and more, I expect, until I can catch up.

I know that ultimately, I'll need to do some heavy editing of this draft, once it's complete. Not just to fix some inconsistencies, but also to ensure the things that are consistent are historically accurate. Or at least, as accurate as a non-specialist like me can get them in a fictional tale.

But since I know I'll need to do it, it doesn't scare me to get things wrong now. What's important now, I think, is to get the emotional beats of the story right. If I can nail down the characters, and how they react to the things that happen to them, I can fix the details later. Even if those details mean I need changes to the events of the plot, that's fine. So long as the emotional arc of things is right.

That's my theory, at least.

I want to thank those of those you who've been reading me regularly through this hell year. You give me hope that someday, these novels I grind away at will see the light of publication.

And for my fellow writers, I offer a hope and a blessing: May your writing be a joy and comfort to you. May your inner editor take a vacation when you're drafting. And may all your tales be true.

Onward to 2021!

When my wife and I moved into our new house back in February, we thought that would be the most stressful thing we did this year.

When I backed out of working a booth at a conference in early March because some Covid-19 cases had been reported in California, we thought I was being overly cautious.

When I had my birthday party on Zoom in April, with cases raging both here and back east, we thought that would be the low point.

When May came, and protests exploded across the country, we thought it wasn't safe to join them because of the potential for the virus to spread, never imagining that the police would be the biggest threat.

And then...and then the year is a blur for me, truly. Protests, and cops run riot, and record wildfires, punctuated by two camping trips taken in desperation, to get out of the house, to get somewhere, away from people, only to find that those spaces were crowded, too, and it seemed that no one, young or old, thought wearing a mask or keeping their distance or traveling with just their families was important.

I remember October, because for Halloween we turned out the lights and huddled indoors and hoped no one stopped by to ask for anything, for fear of them bringing the virus with them.

I remember November, because the election dragged on and on and on, and the Trump Regime launched an attack on the legitimacy of the results that failed in the courts but convinced my entire family back home that Biden is an illegitimate President.

Oddly enough, November is when I was first able to mentally breathe again.

It's also when I started writing the novel I'm currently working on, jumping into NaNoWriMo with both feet and falling on my face, as is the 2020 way.

But I picked myself back up, and I'm still working on the book. I like it more and more, as I write it and figure out new things about it. It's going to be different from anything else I've written: a fantasy with very little magic, a historical book with a diverse cast across two continents, a novel told in third-person with entire chapters written in first.

I have no idea what I'm doing. I have no idea if anyone will want to read this thing once it's done. It's scary, but also....a little liberating?

I think that's something I want to take into 2021 with me. An attitude, of not quite "fuck it," but close. More like "you have no idea what's going to happen in the world, and no control over it, so you should write what you want and worry about selling it later."

Which is not to say that I've held back from writing the stories I'd like to. More that, when writing them, I've aimed to write something sellable, something I think the market will buy. It's a...pressure, I guess, that I put on myself. To put some elements in and not others, to shy away from tackling anything too big or too strange.

This novel is one step along the path of letting that go. It's a weird structure. It's about a time and place(s) that no one (in the US) writes about. Its main character is disabled.

It'll probably go nowhere, even if I manage to pull it off, craft-wise. I'm writing it anyway.

So thank you, 2020, for teaching me this much: Writing is hard, so you should write what you love.

See you all in 2021.

Happy Holidays!

I'm finally back in my office. All the house work we've had done for the last three months -- while we lived, worked, ate, and slept sealed-off in the guest room -- is over. Taking down the barrier between the guest room and the rest of the house was like opening a huge present; we were grinning like kids the whole time.

And the work all looks fantastic, and a little unreal. Like we've stumbled into someone else's house. But no, it's ours! And we can once again use it all.

So I'm back to watching the sun come up over the mountains just east of the city, hammering out words before the work of the day begins.

Speaking of which, the novel's up to 18,000 words. So I'm putting out about 2,000 words a week, which is not bad, but does mean this draft won't be done until looks away, does mental math sometime in June (?!).

Which is...fine, I suppose. That's still a novel draft in less than a year. But if I only work on one project at a time, that means it'll be six months before I get back to editing my last novel. I've gotten some excellent feedback from my beta readers, and I'd like to incorporate it all before sending it out to agents.

Maybe I can keep working on the new draft during the week, and edit the other novel on the weekends? That's technically not taking the weekend off, but it is taking a break from the current draft. And editing's the kind of work that's hard for me to track, in the sense of how many words I've covered. These editing passes I'll need to jump around in the narrative, adding a bit of dialog here, changing a description there. It's not linear work.

What about you? Do you work only one project at a time, even if that delays things? Or do you find a way to juggle multiple pieces at once?

Anyway, as we wind down 2020, I hope you and yours are coming through the pandemic safe. I hope the vaccine gets rolled out to where-ever you are soon, and that enough folks get it for the danger to pass.

Good riddance to 2020. I'll see you all in 2021!

Novel's at around 16,400 words. I haven't done today's writing session, though, so I should finish out the week closer to 17K.

The deal is working, so far. Holding myself hostage, unable to go for my morning job or take a shower or have breakfast or anything until my writing's done for the day, has been rather effective.

And I'm looking forward to the weekend again, when I can daydream and doodle and research and not have to worry about hitting a word count. That recharge time is proving important, for my mental health and for my writing.

Funny, I think I started this year by throwing away word count goals and the idea of penalizing myself for not meeting them. Here I am at the end of the year, once again setting daily word count goals and forcing myself to meet them. It seems not only do different techniques work for different people, different things can work for the same person at different times.

What about you? What previous writing habit have you brought back this year, if any? Or maybe there's an old trick you've dropped?

Novel crossed 15,000 words today!

My pace has slowed since NaNoWriMo, but I'm still managing about 2,000 words a week, which is pretty good for me. Puts me on track to finish this draft sometime early next year.

I've changed up my writing routine a bit, both to give myself more time to write, and to have a chance to recharge.

So I've made a deal with myself: I have to write in the morning, first thing, as soon as I get up. No news, no twitter, no email. Just writing, until the day's words (at least 250) are done. I can take however long I want to set those 250 words down, but I can't do anything else until I do.

Most days, I end up going beyond those 250. Once the pump is primed, the words keep flowing.

In exchange for this early-morning discipline, I only have to write on week days. Monday through Friday. Saturday and Sunday are days off, now, just like they would be (I hope) if I were a full-time writer. If I did write full-time, I'd still need vacations. Still need days off. But I'd have no one to tell me when to take them, and I'd probably feel guilty if I did.

So I've made this deal. Treat writing like job, get it done first thing in the morning, and in return, I can take the weekends off.

Sunday was the first day I've deliberately taken off (from writing) in...months. I still did some research for the current book, digging up images and articles on Swedish manors built or renovated in the 18th century. I sketched some notes for future scenes. But I didn't write anything, didn't have to produce any words.

It was...incredibly relaxing. It was glorious.

And I came into Monday's writing session recharged. Ready and eager to go.

This is the first full week I've been working under this self-made bargain. I'm looking forward to the weekend, having met my word count goal every day this week, first thing upon waking.

What about you? Do you ever take days off from writing? Do you feel guilty when you do, and if so, how do you handle it?

So I didn't win NaNoWriMo this year. It wasn't even close.

But I'm not quitting on the novel. I've come too far not to see it through.

And NaNoWriMo has got me flexing my writing muscles again. After today's writing session, I'll have churned out almost 2,000 words in a single week. That's not novel in a month pace, sure, but it's a novel-in-a-few-months-pace, which is better than I've been able to achieve since the pandemic began.

Even so, I still feel pressed for writing time. I want to brainstorm for a bit, every day, before working on a scene. Or after finishing a scene, reflect on what might be missing from it, what I'll need to add the next day. And that's hard to do, when I've only got thirty minutes or so free to spend on the novel.

It's good that I've got some vacation coming up at the end of the month, then. That'll certainly give me more time in which to work.

But I want -- I need -- to carve out more time during a regular work day. Which might mean dropping some of my other hobbies (I've been brushing up my French, and learning Swedish) in order to make that time. Or maybe I'll get up even earlier, so I can make that time at the start of the day.

Not sure what's best. Gotta figure something out, though.

What about you? What do you do, when you feel like you're not getting enough writing time?