“The people who need what you have to say are waiting for you and they don’t care that you think it's boring, unoriginal or lacking in value.”
Havi Brooks

author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

actually writing blog

Not Sleeping Only Means You Care
Tue 2006-07-11 08:16:47 (in context)
  • 50,830 words (if poetry, lines) long
  • 22.25 hrs. revised

Things take time. If nothing else, that's what I'm learning from all this daily goal setting. Submitting critiques takes time, because I can't freakin' shut up. Finding and emailing interview subjects takes time, because I don't know many names off-hand in the fields I'm researching and I'm anal about getting my emails worded just right. Revising fiction takes time because I'm a freakin' perfectionist with maybe shades of ye olde obsessive compulsive disorder.

And four-hour training sessions on how to facilitate use of evil yet compellingly shiny electronic voting devices from Hart Intercivic take a really long time, especially if you hang around the county clerk's office for an hour afterwards to discover whether your out-of-town plans have turned out to interfere with your availability as supply judge. (They do. I won't be around on Saturday, August 5 to pick up the supplies, see. But I will be retained as a machine judge, so the training hasn't gone to waste.) And then if the bike ride to and from the county clerk's office exposes you to more sun than you prepared yourself for, afternoon naps take a really really long time.

So. After a night of not sleeping, where are we at?

  • Not a word written today on the freelance gig, but lots of progress made Monday morning in seeking interviews.
  • Revised chapter 3 of The Golden Bridle and will email it as soon as this poor old WinME-running laptop stops giving me hell via its context menus. Chapter 3 took so long that we'll just talk about chapter 4 next week.
  • Turned in a very long and wordy critique at the Critters site. One more by Wednesday and my ratio will be happy.
  • Poked my head in a friend's private novel critique forum, as promised, at Critique Circle. Although if my day's obligation is merely to poke my head in the forum, it's probably not worth a bullet point here.
And now it's 9:30 in the morning and I just really need some sleep. I'll be up again about noon or one with a single bullet-point goal for Tuesday, never fear. But for now, I sleep the sleep of the just. Or the just-plain-exhausted, I'm not sure which. Possibly both.

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