I am about 12-18 days away from finishing the first draft of my novel. I cannot begin to tell you how excited I am to have typed that sentence. Of course, after the rough draft is completed, then I have to begin the revisions. That task isn’t going to take that long because I already have some idea of needs to be revised (one character needs to have dialogue fleshed out, another needs to have some scenes added in) and that might tip me over the 60K limit I set up for myself. Not a problem for me, since I also intend on carving out 6K words of the manuscript before I send it to the editor for the final hammering (thank you Stephen King for the guideline: Your manuscript – 10% = success). If everything works out, this novel should be hitting everything by November. I am getting ready to find an artist to work on the cover and I have a feeling this is going to be somewhat… pricey, but hey – I need to take this more seriously than the last book (still available on Amazon!), even if it’s being written under a pseudonym. I still can’t believe that this is going to get finished soon. After it’s finished and sent to the editor (thank you, masked editor!), I am going to jump onto I/O Error and get that finished. After that… who knows? I’ve got tons of ideas and thanks to Amazon and Smashwords; I can get them out there. With any luck, I can get away from my job and work on a career – a career that I am very late coming to, but a career nonetheless.

On to other things: the Olympics! Next week are the beginning of the Opening Ceremonies. I’m bummed that I am going to miss them, but they and the rest of the Olympics are going to be faithfully recorded. I should clear out some space in the DVR… but all I have are series that I will have to either watch all the way through in one sitting or delete them. Some are not going to be a problem to delete, but others… well… I could just by the DVDs (the series in question: Fringe, Battlestar: Galactica, The Mentalist – all told, these series are taking it over half of my DVR space), which I was going to do anyway. Well, let’s just see what happens with the DVR for the time being.

Well, I am going to try to cut this entry a little short. I’ve been lollygagging off screen by going to the Internet and reading a few web comics and looking up some things (curse you, TV Tropes!). So, I will say good day and wish you luck on your endeavors. I’ve got characters to torment and not a whole lot of time to do it in. Oh, look – I went over my 500 word goal.

Sincerely,

Seething Apathy