I know it's laughable, but I do still harbor this crazy idea of making a post here every day. Given my track record so far, you might feel I should just give up on that goal ... and you'd have a point, but the thing is, the daily exercise is useful to me, or at least I think it would be useful to me if I managed to do it. So I'm going to keep trying. And, probably, keep failing, but, y'know, sometimes that's the way it goes.

The issue is mostly with the way my time tends to play out. I can't post an entry here in the morning, because nothing has happened yet. If I posted first thing in the morning, all these entries would be one line: Bleah. "Bleah" is the extent of my conversational outlook, most mornings. Even the good ones.

The ideal time to post would be about six-thirty in the evening. That's when the events of the day have mostly already happened, and they're still fresh enough in my mind that I can record them. But six-thirty is cocktail time, and because that hour is for decompression, I like to do recreational things. I'm not saying these entries are a chore, but they are certainly not recreational.

So then I have the cocktail and seven-thirty is dinner and then it's eight o'clock and now it's time to write that entry? Hell, no! Time's a-wastin', especially if I had a day where I was required to spend a significant amount of time doing Things Other Than Story Work -- which is a lot of things. If I had to actually earn a living that day, for example. Sometimes this does happen. Anyway, the point is, with dinner over and my time to myself -- assuming it's not one of the two nights I am willing to spend an hour with the television, or we're not doing something extraordinary like leaving the house after sundown for something or another, or I'm not temporarily absorbed in some other distraction like playing CONTROL for four nights -- I want to work on story, story, story, and nothing but story. Write an entry? Who has time for that?

Eventually, about eleven pm, which is usually when I wind down story work and try to do something else for a bit before I go to sleep because otherwise my brain will just loop through story all night and it'll be bad, I remember that I didn't write an entry. Of course, by then, anything brilliant and witty I might have wanted to say at, say, noon, is long gone.

But I rarely have anything particularly brilliant or witty to say anyway.

We are past the horrible part of the home renovation, I hope. There are several things left to do, but they're all loose ends and finishing-up tasks; none of them involve the kind of massive disruption that we endured yesterday (for example). The systems are all working -- I think. I'm not copacetic about the ability of the heat pumps to actually heat the house, and I want to test it by trying to get the house Extremely Warm sometime in the next few days. My thinking is, it's better to see how it works right now while we're having sixty-degree weather than find out it can't do the job we bought it for in December in thirty-degree weather.

The October story -- that is, the story I'm working on during October -- is rolling along, but as always, it's not rolling along fast enough for me. Every night I look at what I managed to do that day and every night I look at the plot outline, and every night I think I haven't gotten far enough. Next year, I say for the thousandth time, I'm abandoning the "story a month" business. It's causing me neurosis, and I have no time for that.