Half-asleep update

Spent the past few days at the writing retreat, mostly writing but also hanging out with cool folks.

Monday afternoon, I finished the second draft of my novel. Or novel-like thing. It still needs significant work, including some research, and it's still way too short to actually sell as a novel (I was really excited when I tried putting it in Standard Manuscript Format and found it was 60k words by Printer's Rule wordcount, and then I was really disappointed when fellow retreaters with more novel/publishing experience than I said that agents and editors go by word-processor count these days, so it's still only 49k, grr), and for that matter I still need to read through it and probably do a little bit of polishing here and there before I'll be willing to really say the second draft is entirely done. And yet! Second draft! Basically done! Especially exciting because I'd made very little progress on it in the past couple months.

This morning, I woke up too early after too little sleep, frittered away an hour or so online, then got up and went through the rental-house checkout checklist. When I finished there, I hung out with the remaining other writers for a bit (we had brunch at a nice little place called Garden Grill, just outside of Guerneville); then I drove out to the house in Santa Rosa where we lived for a couple years when I was a kid, when my parents ran a foster home for emotionally disturbed teenagers, called Hearthlight. I had stopped by the house a couple years ago, and the then-current resident even let me walk through it and look around; this time I just drove past and took a couple photos, then continued on my way. Hung out with Ananda and Sam and Ardis for a couple hours, hung out with Beth & Catie and the kids for a couple hours, then drove home. Have now backed up my computer, copied photos off of phone, and sent a couple of brief email notes, and am trying to convince myself to step away from the computer and complete the process of going to sleep. If I delay much longer, I'll fall asleep on the keyboard and crush the computer, and that would be bad. So I'll stop now.

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