I know it's not International Talk Like a Pirate Day...

...but, as with many holidays, shouldn't the spirit be kept all year long? (Plus, I thought this graphic was fabulous. Is it N.C. Wyeth?)

What Kind of Pirate are You? You're the TRADITIONAL PIRATE. Stealing gold, backstabbing other pirates, being suspicious of everyone you meet, running from the law... you're the real thing. People don't like to mess with you because you always manage to get your way. Just watch out, those parrots can be a little messy sometimes.... Take this quiz!

The strange zone between Christmas and New Year, or, goal-setting mania

You may call them "resolutions." I prefer to call them "goals." Not only do I have my Gauntlet II goals (see previous post), but I've formulated a page of goals for 2008 — a page! — three of which have become my Big, Fun, Scary goals (a bit of frivol run by the NaNoWriMo folks. I've found that goal-setting really, really works for me. I just hope I don't drive myself nuts by over-goaling. I suppose as long as I'm willing to jettison goals that become unweildy or unrealistic, I'll be all right....

We spent a few days in Melbourne after Christmas, seeing family and friends. I was particularly happy to see my Clarion buddies Chris and Jess. (Alessio, where were you?) We'd been hoping to also spend some time, at last, with the horses, but they are still under the equine-flu quarantine, upsettingly enough.

In a moment I will resume work on one of my Gauntlet II goals: revising The Associates (my adventure novel). I keep getting mutually contradictory feedback from various people on it, so I need to be quite careful about frantically rushing from paragraph to paragraph, trying to fix this and fix that and fix it back again, stretching to plug all the leaks with spread fingers and splayed toes, when they might not even be leaks to begin with. I'm very glad for all the feedback, though, because it's all useful in pointing out things that need to be looked out. Writing is all about choices, and conscious choices are definitely better than mindless, lizard-brain choices. Most of the time. (Sometimes you have to go with your gut — but even that is a conscious choice!)

By the way, our treasured friends Paul and Carolyne, who were some of the friends we were so happy to see in Melbourne, gave me cookie cutters for Christmas! Carolyne, if you're reading this blog (which you have done at least once, clearly), thanks! And you're always welcome to leave a comment — as are any other lurkers....

Gauntlet II — why not play at home?

The instant the Gauntlet challenge was over, I needed more deadlines. I don't work very well without deadlines. I don't even care if they're essentially meaningless deadlines (like NaNoWriMo), I just need deadlines to focus my wandering attention. So I hereby announce Gauntlet II, and you can play, too, if you want! Here are the rules:

1. Pick three writing projects of any kind, any size, any genre, and any medium, currently started or unstarted, or languishing at any point in the creative pipeline.
   
   
2. Finish the projects by February 29, 2008. "Finish" means you, personally, can't see any other ways to tinker with them at all. They're as good as you can make them without outside feedback and/or letting them ripen on your hard drive for five or six months. (Note: if your goal is "finish the first draft of a novel", then finishing the first draft, even if it's still way tinkerable, does count as meeting the goal.)

My goals are to do the revisions on my first novel, The Associates; to complete the first draft of my NaNo opus Mud and Glass; and to write the script for a 10-minute play for children, which I will be entering in a competition.

Why don't you play, too? Go ahead and post your goals as a comment here, if you want a public record, or just play your cards close to your chest. The Gauntlet does not care. The Gauntlet waits for you to approach....

Un — be — lievable!

Indescribable. Unbelievable. Fabulous.

Christmas Eve

In my family, we've always had the big meal and the opening of family presents (as opposed to Santa presents) on Christmas Eve. (I eventually found out that this is yet another way that German culture has kept its tenacious hold on us, even more than 150 years after my German and Swiss forebears emigrated to America.) So I spent all day cooking, and it made me very happy. Big ol' turkey. Macadamia stuffing, in quantities excessive enough to make even me wonder how we're going to eat it all (the answer to that is usually "A-duh, like, so, Laura's going to have stuffing for breakfast, lunch, and dinner all week, how did you think?"). Steamed green beans. Candied sweet potatoes (with cardamom, mm, mm!). Cranberry sauce. Ricotta-and-roast-garlic mashed potatoes (details on request). And the last of my carefully hoarded cans of American pumpkin — heartfelt thanks, Kelly and Tim — made into a dee-licious pie (pity about the crust this time, though). Nom nom nom!

Note to the frugal: if your pie-filling recipe ends up making too much filling for the size of pie crust you have, sift together some flour and baking powder (about 1 tsp per two cups of flour seemed to work for me), mix it into the leftover filling, and bake it as a sort of pumpkin bread/pumpkin pudding (in the English/Australian sense of pudding). Both the pie and the pudding taste FABULOUS with some nice, fresh whipped cream (although I'm hardly one to frown on spray-cream either).

In between cooking this feast, I've been in email-and-blog-storm mode with the other Gauntleteers, who are finished or nearly finished, and who are generously offering crits of my Gauntlet stories.

Loving God, thank you that we have full stomachs and gifts to share and friends to email and a sparkly Christmas tree to stare at. Help us use 2008 to make things better for someone, or many someones.

Information technology and togetherness

I've long been a big fan of information technology as a social medium. Not just phones, of course, but the whole range —and none moreso than online communities. I was, if not an innovator, at least an early adopter of email, online communities and forums, chat, newsgroups, web sites, etc. The only thing I lagged in adopting, oddly, was blogs, this one being not even two years old yet.

Like many people, I've made lifelong friends with whom I developed lasting, valued, and robust relationships long before finally getting together FTF (as they say). I even fell in love with my husband before we met in person. (Long before that sort of thing became commonplace and, eventually, a bit tawdry before recovering its respectability.)

These days, people deplore (or say they do, anyway) how kids sit at the keyboard for hours, isolated, even detached, from reality. But in our family, it's actually kind of fun to all be on line at the same time. We chat from separate rooms, draw each other's attention to cool links, discuss the news (and YouTube videos) we happen to see, do ad-hoc research as we find questions we can't answer, tell and send jokes, encourage each other via our blogs (and public encouragement, in writing, is a very powerful thing) — in short, it rather draws us together in real life than otherwise.

So I'm all for it. Vive l'informatique!

I...um...looks like I did it.

Three stories written. Three stories polished. And it's not Christmas yet. Huh. I honestly doubted whether I'd be able to pull it off. But, as both Jasoni and Chris Baty (founder of NaNoWriMo) have noted, a deadline is a powerful thing that can bring us to awesomeness. And I'm the Deadline Queen.

The Gauntlet shakes its mailed fist and vanishes in a cloud of rust and a whiff of WD-40. I AM TRIUMPHANT.

All three Gauntlet stories — drafted!

Yes, in a massive 1,300-word dash to the finish (it helped that the air got quite a bit cooler and drier after the second front in two days passed through), I finished the draft of "Degredado".

Tomorrow, I will revise! And revise and revise! And research markets! And, hopefully, send! (Or at least determine what market each will go to once the editors are back from Christmas break — for example, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine doesn't get back until January 15, and since I have no control over that, I consider that having a story ready for sendout counts as fulfilling the requirements of the Gauntlet Challenge.)

Once I have either completed the Challenge or been smacked by the Gauntlet in semi-defeat at midnight on Christmas Eve, I can start on the many projects that have been waiting patiently: revisions to my first novel, progress on my second (particularly preparing the first 50 pages for submission to the Orbit contest, writing a radio play to submit to Australia's Richest Radio Play Competition, working on my full-length stage play, perhaps even writing a one-act to submit to The Manawatu (New Zealand) International One-Act Playwriting Competition 2008 and the Short+Sweet One Act Festival (plays that are 20-30 minutes long, instead of 10). If I really get cracking, I might even be able to submit something to the Shorter+Sweeter for Kids competition (10-minute plays for kids). Problem is, many of these have similar deadlines....

Well, you don't reach, you never grasp.

Aaaaack!

It — is — so — HUMID, I feel like I'm living inside someone's LUNGS. Everything is sticky and clammy and musty. Ew ew ew.

Running out of Gauntlet options

"Degredado" is turning out to be not at all the story I though it would be. It's less weird, but perhaps more interesting. Maybe someday I'll manage to write a genuinely weird story.

The good news is, I will almost certainly have the three Gauntlet stories written before Christmas. The bad news is, I'm not sure I'll have them all polished to sendout level by midnight Tuesday. Still, that's four whole days (as we're only a few minutes into Saturday at the moment). Anything could happen in four days!

The cookies, by the way, turned out really, really well, and none the worse for being the diameter of the opening of a 32-ounce soda cup. I'm very glad I elected to bake only some of the cookie dough, though. The weather here in Wollongong is so hellishly humid (did you know Hell is a damp place?) that the cookies softened grotesquely within an hour of coming out of the oven. There is a cold front moving over us right this very minute, and there's a chance the air on the other side may be a bit drier. Which will mean the next dozen Megacookies may stay nice and fresh for slightly longer. (Thanks, Grandma, for showing me, all those years ago, that you can keep cookie dough in the fridge for a day or two before baking it — if your greedy family [here, Laura blushes for forty-year-old sins] quits pinching off hunks of it when you're not looking.)

Traditions

Even though it's STINKING hot today, that does not change the fact that Christmas is approaching. (Twelve years. And I'm still not used to summer Christmases. I refuse to become used to summer Christmases.) Margaret is having a friend over tonight. The combination of these two things means that I am assaulted with my own inadequacies as a mom at Christmas -- where are the Christmas cookies, Laura? And don't say, "The supermarket."

With the bitter question ringing in my ears, I set out to prepare for cookie-making.

At which point I find that all my cookie cutters have disintegrated into brown grit.

Undaunted by the appalling implications, I have decided to use plastic soda cups as my cookie cutters. This (1) assuages the bitter questioners, as I am, in fact, making cookies, and (2) gives them an insolent flip-off, as I can guarantee you my grandmother never used soda cups as cookie cutters.

Trying hard

A week to go on the Gauntlet challenge. I'm short of sleep today, because of the push to finish drafting the second story in the pre-dawn hours, so it's hard to make real progress on the third story. If I get more than two hundred words written tonight, it will be a miracle. (Much of the day, wherein I would usually be writing, was taken up with family logistics and a dental appointment.)

Still, I had a bit of a read of the third story so far, and I'm kind of liking the weirdness of it. I don't do weird very well, so this is yet another artistic stretch for me. I reckon the Gauntlet experiment can be considered successful solely because of this artistic stretching, even if I don't get all three written and polished this week. So, huzzah! Huzzah for the Gauntlet, and huzzah for the Gauntleteers!

In other news — no, there's no other news at the moment, except that I'm a bit woozy and should probably go to sleep soon, but the Christmas tree is lit up, and the beer is only half-finished, and I think I'll go check my email for the billionth time today.

Gauntlet Story 2 — first draft complete!

It's 2 a.m., one of my favorite writing times (surpassed only by 4 a.m.). Houston sleeps sonorously next to me, and I've just finished the first draft of "Mertrude, Please," which may or may not end up with that title once I revise it. It's about 2,500 words, which is a tad shorter than I'd anticipated, but that's okay by me. It's also not as farcical as I'd originally thought it would be, although it has its slapstick moments, I suppose. I like writing farce, but it's not what my subconscious is leading me to at this exact moment in my life. I guess I'll go with that, as my subconscious has often been right before. (Example: Houston has read my NaNo opus, which was produced using something akin to automatic writing, and says he likes it better than my took-forever, been-revised-dozens-of-times first novel, The Associates.)

Gauntlet status: two stories drafted, third one begun, one week to go. Don't know if I'll get the third one written and all three polished for sendout, but, as I said before, I'm going to give it a red-hot go.

Gauntlet update -- it's a nail-biter, folks!

After kicking "Mertrude, Please!" around for a week, I finally know what the problem was: characteristically for me, I was trying to tell too much of the story in a story, instead of focusing on one pivotal moment, one flash of crisis. In real life, there are a hundred of these a day for each of us: turning points, decisions, indecisions, accidents, incidents, moments that crystallize who someone is, in an instant. A short story is about one of these instants, not four or five. Or forty or fifty.

I got the crit more than once at Clarion that a given story of mine was really a book masquerading as a story. It's not a function of how long the piece is, but how many crisis instants I've tried to shoehorn into that space. Too many — in other words, more than one, in most cases — and the story is muddy and overwrought. None at all, and the story is a wank.

So, looking over at my notes (and yes, I have been using notes and outlines and character-desire grids and all that for this story), I'm seeing that I've got enough in there for several decision points for each character. And that's just a big ol' game of Twister, which is never as much fun as it looks like on the TV ads.

So "Mertrude, Please!" is now just about one lunchtime meeting, rather than several weeks of rivalry and thwarted love. The trick will be, can I make this one decision point so rich that the reader can imagine the whole, full world of rivalry and love that keeps going on after the story ends?

The Gauntlet stirs: its gesture, a palm-up "Eh", a one-handed shrug. Then it points to the calendar: just over a week to finish two stories and polish all three for sendout.

While one cannot bite the nails inside the Gauntlet without breaking one's teeth, one can bite one's own nails....

An uncomfortable moment

I spent the day on a little jaunt to Sydney today. Sometimes a change of scene is nice, and I had a couple of reasons for wanting to head to the city today in particular. I wanted to buy this year's Cairo Jim book, something that each year makes me very happy. I also wanted to go to Herbie's Spices, which is right near the NSW Writers' Centre — which was doing its December mailout today, at which I was volunteering, and that was why I picked today to go to Sydney. It was also where my uncomfortable moment occurred.

One of the other volunteers — as yet unpublished — has written a large-ish work for the stage. Instead of workshopping it or applying for development grants or trying to get it produced on a smaller scale, and instead of working to build credibility by getting smaller works produced and/or published, the writer is emailing Andrew Lloyd Webber and Richard Branson, looking for them to back the production. The writer also reckons there's no reason why one of Australia's most prosperous and frequently performed composers (no, this does not yet describe Houston, although he's getting there steadily) wouldn't write the score for free, in return for a share in the profits of this blockbuster.

One bites one's tongue, and one prays to God one has never appeared as...well, "naive" doesn't even come close. The utter unshakable conviction this writer had of being entitled to acclaim and riches I found desperately embarrassing to observe. Please, God, keep me humble and appreciative of the benefits of hard work and diligence. And humility.

In Gauntlet news, I'm making good progress on "Mertrude, Please!" but I keep thinking of more and more problems I must fix in "Zork." But a half-finished Cairo Jim book is calling me....

Zork is home!

The first draft of "Zork Goes Home" is done. (I may change the title, now that it's more clear what is actually happening in the story -- at least to me.) As predicted, it was about 6,000 words. I instantly turned right around and cut over a thousand. I'll now let it sit while I work on the other projects, then have another hack at it just after before* Christmas. Then I'll send it out, as the verification that it is ready to send out.

Hm. It took me two weeks to send Zork home. The other two stories had better go a tad faster, or the Gauntlet's finger will extend again. And I mean the rude finger (as Margaret used to say).

*I realized that the Gauntlet rules were to have the stories sendoutable by Christmas, not after. Yikes. It's going to be a busy two weeks.

Gauntlets and late nights

The first draft of "Zork Goes Home" is nearly complete; I reckon it'll go to about 6,000 words, which I will then do my very best to cut back to 4,000. It's not my usual ripping-yarn plot-fest. Instead, it's a small-story-hints-at-huge-societal-changes thing, which is not necessarily something I feel all that comfortable writing. I'd rather have tons of plot than tons of spec. But this one completely reverses my usual proportions, which I suppose is a useful exercise. If it ends up selling, once it's all polished up, I will at least know that it doesn't kill a story dead not to have a ton of Victorian-adventure-style cliffhanging. ("But reading that sort of thing is so much funnnnn," whine the throngs who comprise Laura's imaginary public.)

The next piece, "Mertrude, Please," I'm anticipating to be a farce of about 3,000 words. I like writing farce, so that will be pure self-indulgence. A little Christmas present to myself.

The third, "Degredado," is actually starting to look very angsty, even a bit mystical, which, again, is not my usual thang. But if you can't stretch a little, there's no point in keeping on writing stories, I think. I hope to God that every story I write keeps being different.

Three stories. "Ha," one thinks at the start of one's Gauntlet challenge. "I laugh at danger! Ha ha ha! That's me, laughing! At danger!" But it's turning out to be a tad more involved than I'd originally, sanguinely, thought. It's turning out to be something that's forcing me to be a better writer.

Ah, well.

I didn't make the final cut for Short and Sweet. Still, getting short-listed is a fairly cool achievement. (Further than I got last year, at any rate.) I can't help thinking, though, that it would have been nice to get a play performed for the festival.

Either way, there are plenty of other opportunities in the world. As long as I keep generating product, and sending it out into the world, eventually it will accomplish the purpose for which I sent it. (Unless, of course, all my stuff is crap, in which case all the persistence in the world can only come to naught, and I only appear pathetic.)

Gauntlet update

Productivity had been fairly close to zero today: I'd written about 300 words on "Zork Goes Home" and that was it. Which is pretty embarrassing, as I do not have a paying job at the moment and should be churning out at least 2,000 words a day every day. But I could feel things rolling around in my brain, and suddenly the top of my head blew off and I found an entire societal context for what had happened so far in the story. This new context also solved a lot of my story problems and gave the story itself a sudden resonance that I'm really looking forward to playing with. Interestingly, there are also potential links with one of my favorites among my Clarion stories ("Bleeding Orange"). I think I'm onto a suite of related tales here. Which is kind of satisfying, artistically, even if none of them ever gets published.

I have State Emergency Service training tonight, which will limit the amount of time I have to push "Zork Goes Home" where it needs to go. Still, I should get a fair number of words written this afternoon, and tomorrow I have absolutely nothing scheduled at all. Absolutely nothing. I don't have to drive anyone anywhere, I don't have any appointments. I do have a bit of SES paperwork I need to get out of the way, but hopefully that won't take more than about an hour and a half. Aside from that, tomorrow is Quit Whingeing And Get The Word Count Under Control day.

What I did today instead of writing

I read the weekend papers (the Sydney Morning Herald and the Australian).

I washed a lot of dishes.

I did some editing on a story.

I read friends' blogs.

I watched my daughter perform in the drama-school performance night. She did a very professional job, and helped hold things together when others dropped lines. She also has a nice voice and dances confidently. There may be other kids with a better voice or better dancing ability or even better acting ability, maybe, somewhere. But Margaret has the package, along with reliability, smarts, and professionalism. And that, I reckon, is what will get her gigs when the time comes.

Soon we will resume decorating the tree.

Tomorrow Margaret and I are heading into Sydney, partly for excursion's sake, and partly to finish our Christmas shopping. Houston will languish at home (although I think, after the year he's had, a bit of languishing sounds like a really good idea to him).

I may get some writing done tonight, and/or maybe tomorrow night. Or I may just decide to be reckless, and hope I catch up on things during the week next week....

Miscellaneous

1. I promised myself that after NaNoWriMo I'd let myself watch our Season One DVD of The IT Crowd. This was a good idea, and it's even better now that I'm following through with it.

2. We've purchased this year's Christmas tree and decked it in lights (the ornaments we will do tomorrow). This year we went Geek Family and bought a couple of strings of LED tree lights. They've got EIGHT different ways they flash, some less entrancing than others. But we've found a setting we can all agree on, and, with a (non-flashing) string of traditional lights as contrast, they look quite stunning.

3. "Zork Goes Home" is sounding terribly flat to me at the moment. I can't even make it seem interesting to me as a character study. How very frustrating: the Christmas tree glitters and astounds. The story doesn't. Phooey.

4. Tomorrow night Margaret performs in a musical number at her drama school's performance night (one of them, actually -- they have bunches for all the different age groups). I love watching Margaret perform. But I'm the mom; it would be a little sad if I didn't.

Gauntlet update

For those following the First Clarion South Class of 2007 Gauntlet action from the edge of their seats, here is the status of my various Gauntlet (and non-Gauntlet) projects.

• Gauntlet Story 1 ("Degredado"): nearly 800 words drafted.
  
• Gauntlet Story 2 ("Zork Goes Home"): 2,100 words drafted.
  
• Gauntlet Story 3 ("Mertrude, Please"): more than 100 (yes, one hundred, not one thousand) words drafted.
  
• NaNo Opus Mud and Glass (to be submitted to the Orbit/Queensland Writers' Centre Script Development Program): 50,000 words out of a targeted 90,000 drafted.
  
• (Non-spec) novel The Associates complete at 80,000 words; revisions begun but on hold until after Christmas.
  
• Full-length play-in-progress: 19 pages (out of a targeted 120) drafted.

All this is partly to encourage myself — and partly to distract myself from the wracking wait for the Short & Sweet final selection, the reception of two rejections in one day, and the demoralizing persistence of this wretched head cold.

The tiger has eyes. Or rather, eye. The fists are of steel.

A new world record!

I just got a rejection within the very same hour I emailed the piece out. Yes. I do think that's a new world record, at least for me. I'm not sure whether all the advances in communications technology have been a good thing or a bad thing for writers' psyches.

Yee-HAAAAAAAAAA!

My 10-minute play "Don't Know Much" has been shortlisted — one of 317, out of 1,550 submitted — for the Sydney Short & Sweet play festival. Aaaaaaaaaa!

Now: of those 317, a total of 130 get selected (by the various directors) for production: 90 "best of the best" and 40 "wildcard" slots. The top 90 run in groups of 10 plays; each groups gets a week to be performed every night; whereas the wildcard ones each get only one glorious night (in groups of 10 each night).

So now I'm sitting on a cold metal chair along the wall, wearing my best dress and uncomfortable shoes as the mirror ball spins and the stereo plays "Nights in White Satin", waiting to be picked by a nice director whose hands, hopefully, aren't too sweaty....

For info on the play-selection process and a link to the short list, see this page of the Short & Sweet site.

Hmm. How persistent is the conditioning?

I just did a bit of insomniacal work on one of my three Gauntlet* stories. What with concerts, and editing gigs, and State Emergency Service stuff, and being really rather unwell with this head cold (not to dwell on it, mind you), I realized it was pretty much the first fiction writing I'd done since validating my 50,000 word count for NaNoWriMo.

I found myself going back to edit and polish as I wrote, which is my usual method, and each time a little voice shrieked, "No! Word count! Get the word count! Edit later! Polish later! Word count! As soon as you write it, it's valid word count! Don't change it, don't, don't —"

I did, in fact, change it, every time, but it was a wrench to do it. On the one hand, it's good to know that now, when I have to, I can suspend the compulsion to fiddle as I write. On the other hand, I'd rather not think I'm going to be compelled to suspend the compulsion (although the irony is intriguing). Instead, I'd like to think that now I have the choice of which way I want to write.

Will the shrieking subside until next November's NaNo?

*For those who tuned in late, some of my Clarion buddies and I have joined in a mutual challenge: write and polish to sendable state three stories by Christmas.

Writers' Strike -- why it's fair to pay them more.

The unspoken message of this clip, put out by "Strike Life" (web site forthcoming, apparently), is that it's the writers' talents that make the whole entertainment industry...well...entertaining. (The writers don't have money or PR hacks or significant media backing; what they do have is the ability to write. Which, I'm hoping for many reasons, will prove to be more powerful.)

The concert is over, and so is an era.

Houston more or less finished his tenure as musical director of the Illawarra Choral Society tonight with the performance of Handel's "Messiah" (mentioned in a previous blog post). As usual, he did a great job conducting (he's really good). I bashed the hell out of a couple of tympani, which is always a fun thing to do, and Margaret sang in the soprano section.

Margaret said one of the security staff at the venue, a tough-looking little guy all covered in tattoos, told her it was the most beautiful thing he'd ever heard. So -- you just never know. I said to Margaret, "And you were part of that for him. You helped bring him the most beautiful thing he'd ever heard." I think it's important that Margaret is conscious of that kind of power, and that she has it -- the power to bring beauty to people.

Houston's mentor and friend Dr. Don Erb once told him (and he'll be able to give you the exact quote, but here's the gist of it), "If you write one beautiful piece of music, you've been more important to humanity than all the Hitlers and Stalins combined."

Then Margaret went to bed, and Houston and I drank some of our beer and watched "Operatunity Oz Revisited," a where-are-they-now followup to, as you could have predicted, the reality show "Operatunity Oz". We're kind of arts-geeky at our house. It's quite a nice way to live. No Jag in the driveway, but we get chances to bring beauty to people. Better than a Jag any day.

Right. Now. Where were we?

I've survived NaNoWriMo, with a bit of sleep-dep, a flush of triumph, and an extremely nasty head cold. I've completed pretty much all the work for my client (woo-hoo, a bit of money to add to the family coffers!). Tomorrow I play tympani in "Messiah" (conducted by Houston and with Margaret in among the sopranos -- a real family affair; I just hope I can control the coughing from this nasty head cold while I'm on stage). And then...and then....

I can really pitch into the Gauntlet Throwdown and get those three stories written before Christmas!

After that, it's revise the MS of my first (that is, non-NaNo) novel, work on the script to my full-length play, and, maybe after all that, take up the NaNo MS again and see if I think it's worth further effort.

And that, Fair Reader, is my Writing Game Plan for the next few months. If it gets derailed, hopefully it will be derailed by some sort of marvellous success, rather than my own sloth and short attention span....