Stop me if you’ve heard this one before:

Not dead. Busy.

I just spent a couple of days visiting my parents in Ontario, and now I’m back. Go figure; I’m gone two working days and get ten messages from people who are irritated that I didn’t tell them I was going out of town, the majority from acquaintances with whom I speak on average once every couple of weeks or so. Only one or two messages were vital.

Sigh.

I managed to crack out 4K of novel while away, and yet still, still passing Emily eludes me. I note down where she is, I write past that point, return to the update page in triumph, and she’s been writing in the meantime as well and has augmented her count by something newly challenging. If I had the time I could finish this damned thing in a day and be done, but it seems that this year I’ll be typing right down to the line, 23:59:59 on November 30. I’m going to grit my teeth and bash out dreadful prose on Friday until I have to teach at 6.00 pm. And I mean dreadful prose: unfinished sentences, run-on sentences which will have to be severely rewritten, that sort of thing. My first drafts are usually sharp, but with four days to do around 9K I have a sneaky suspicion that the deadline and I are going to get to know one another intimately.

I aim for 2.5K every time I sit down to write, but I can’t sit down every day, and that has severely handicapped me this year. I get the bulk of my writing down on Mondays and Tuesdays, as they constitute my weekend at the moment. It looks like Friday morning and afternoon will be my last major swing at the word count. Saturday night I have to prepare for a three-hour class which will be taught on Sunday afternoon, so I’m assuming that I won’t be able to write. If I get something done, that’s a bonus, but I’m not counting on it; I’ve never taught this class before, and I have to build it from scratch. I can usually squeeze in 1K or so on a Sunday morning. Today before I head downtown I have to finish editing seventy pages of publisher stuff, so that’s out. In fact, that’s what I ought to be doing right now.

So bye. I’ll see you in December.

Current word count of Balsamic Moon: 40,580