Rain, rain!

I still want to do a post about the workshops I went to at RWA National, but before I do that, I want to do a little blog (hopefully I can keep it short) on what's been going on in my life since I got home again. Lately it's been raining. Dolly the granddog is afraid of lightning and thunder and rain, and she's been pretty frantic. We do have the garage open so she can get into a more enclosed space...

Mostly, I've been trying to keep up with a more hectic work schedule, since we're now trying to do with two people what used to take 3 people to do (actually, that's 1.5 and 2.5, but...), plus keep up with everything else that's going on. Which is mostly trying to get back into the writing, though we did take the son to the airport so he could fly to England with the gf to visit her parents. (He's visited them before, but they didn't live in England then.) And then we went car shopping the rest of the evening. And ate dinner at a new-to-us restaurant over on the mainland--very good local Mexican food place. Given the pack of cars parked around it, I figured it would be.

And yes, we did get a new car. I will still be driving the Beast, but the fella will now be driving a new white Toyota Avalon. Car shopping is exhausting.

We also hit some of the end-of-summer, back-to-school sales on tax-free weekend. We were afraid the stores would be crowded, so we just went to island stores, and they weren't crowded at all. Apparently tax-free weekend is old hat now. Or we went to the right stores. Got some really good deals, so didn't feel the need to go anywhere else. (I may go back and buy another pair of the shoes I got, because they're so comfortable. If they still have my size.)

Other than that, I'm trying to get this story written by typing in what I have written. I'm up to 180 pages typed in--getting about 20 pages a day--and I really haven't got the main part of the story untracked. I guess I do, but I don't. It's going to come out WAY over again, and I'm going to have to cut again, but... I am picking out places to hack away. And not hacking anything out yet. It's hard to know what to take out till I get to the end.

But, by doing this, when I get to the end of what I have written so far, I'll be back in the story and be able to go on.

And my pinky finger hurts. My keyboard has gotten INCREDIBLY stiff. The keys have to be pounded with a hammer, almost--especially the right shift key--and my poor right pinky finger is really sore. Not hyperextended--almost jammed. And because it's not straight up and down when I hit the key, it's a little twisted. Anyway, it's sore. And of course, I have to type at the pt Dayjob--but at least the keyboard's not so stiff there. I'm going to have to find some kind of something to pry that stupid key up so I can clean out underneath it.

And, since I changed villains in the story, I'm having to do some little tweaks. Very little ones. The stuff I have still works, but --knowing he's the villain makes things feel creepy to me. Because I know. It's hard to find that balance between keeping the secret from the reader, while giving all the same information my characters know. And since they know squat at the moment...

Okay. Time to go home.