I am officially on vacation! WOO!

Well, for the next four days anyway. It's not a huge break, but it's something and I'm totally willing to take that right now. Collin unexpectedly got the time off as well. So now I am trying to convince him that we should take a trip to Yellowstone tomorrow. He's pretty lukewarm on the idea -- he's willing to subject himself to it, because he knows I want to go, but a day in Yellowstone is a day spent almost entirely in the car and I don't want to be cooped up with him like that if he doesn't want to be there.

So we'll probably just stay home instead. And if we do, then I've got big plans to fertilize the garden, go for a bike ride, and then read on the swing in the backyard. Either way, I intend to spend some time outside for once. I'm tired of being cooped up in the office or at home as the summer passes me by.

I am also trying to shave off a couple of pounds that I put on somewhere in the last couple of weeks. (Could have been a lot of things: the entire loaf of french bread smothered in Nutella, the family sized bag of peanut butter m&ms, the week where I had a cookie with every meal...) I'm the heaviest I've ever been in my life right now. And that's including the time I put on a bunch of weight in college from eating a bunch of breakfast sausage. (Did you know there's like, 60% of your daily fat in one sausage link?) It's invisible weight mostly. But I've always been pretty consistent in what I weigh, so I'd like to shed the extra flub. Easier to do it now than 10 family sized bag of peanut butter m&m's down the road.

I'm also in the market for a dress to wear to a wedding in August. Everything I see at the mall is so freaking ugly. What's up with the like...half-floral, half-paisly prints going on now? And all the dresses I'm seeing are these shapeless, cheap bags. It would be easier if I knew exactly what I was looking for. All I really know is that, apparently, what's in fashion right this minute really doesn't appeal to me.

All of the media coverage of celebrity deaths, and in particular the public memorial for Michael Jackson today, has me thinking about the thing that bothers me the most about the custom of funerals and memorials: we never say these things to people while they're alive.

The belief in an afterlife, and the sort of common belief in the omnipresence of the dead (i.e. they know you've been thinking of them, can hear you eulogizing them from heaven) allows us to get away with never saying aloud to a person our most personal and heart-felt feelings for them. We wait until they're dead believing that then they'll really be able to see into our hearts.

Sometimes perhaps it lays you too emotionally bare to say these things about a person who is still alive. And that's a goddamn shame. Because what if there is no afterlife. What if they're just dead and can't hear all of your loving thoughts while they're sitting on a cloud, strumming their harp? We have our entire LIVES with people and we never stop to really tell them what they mean to us.

Like, where the hell were all of these people when Michael Jackson was facing child molestation charges? He died in debt, getting ready for a "comeback" tour that never happened. He died when the image of him as a freak and a pervert had eclipsed the image of him as the King of Pop in the media mindset. And, let's face it, it means a lot less now to restore his old title than it would have while he could have actually drawn solace from it.

When my cousin died on Mt. Hood, people came out of the woodwork to stand up and say nice things about him. People he hadn't seen since college showed up in the media with quotes about what a great guy he was, how privileged they felt to have known him.

And I have been tormented the past few months with my aunt's declining health with wanting to sit down with her and just SAY what an important part of my life she is, how much I love her, and how much she shaped the person I've become...how I think she's one of the best people I've ever known.

But these aren't the sort of things we say to people. It's a little too personal. A little too emotional. And maybe it's the sort of thing that becomes understood through a lifetime of Halmark cards and Christmases.

But damnit...it shouldn't be that way. It shouldn't be socially awkward to tell someone in private what you could conceivably eulogize about after their death. Why should love be private, but grief public?

Went and saw Transformers 2 today. It's true: there's not much to this movie outside of giant robots fighting each other and blowing things up. But I don't know why anyone would expect it to be anything else. I mean, It's not exactly a character drama. It's a movie about giant robots based on a set of 80's action figures. And it's great for what it is. Though, a few minor things bugged me about it.

Primarily, there's some wacky geography going on near the end. The characters run on foot from Petra in Jordan to the Giza plateau in a matter of minutes. And for some reason, Giza is in the middle of nowhere. And I think in one scene, they had the sphinx buried in the sand up to its neck, which I thought was a bizarre detail.

Also, the human characters are almost as indestructible as the robot ones. But, at the same time, you can't really have humans interacting with giant robots and not have them be somewhat indestructible.

When we got out of the movie, it was pouring rain. And as we got in the car a weather announcement was coming on over the radio that a tornado had been spotted nearby and was going to be coming through town in the next twenty minutes. We made it home just in time, but by then the funnel cloud had apparently dissipated. So no tornado for us. I have to admit that I was a tiny bit disappointed.

That's pretty much all we had planned for the weekend. I'd like to go see a movie not about robots blowing things up (Terminator & Transformers in one summer! Sheesh!). But not this weekend. I was going to go up to Red Lodge and visit my parents, but my mom has to work. While school's out for the summer, she's working the desk at a local hotel. And while she's at work, my dad has big plans to "mow the lawn." Exciting stuff.

So instead of spending time with my family, I think I'm going to spend time with some books and Scrivener -- get some reading and writing done. I'm almost finished with The Inferno and I've got just one major bump to get through with my rewrite of Isle before I can pick up the pace again and get the project finished and out of my hair. I'm no good at working on more than one project at a time, so I really need to get something off my desk. Isle seems like the most likely candidate.

I'm really grateful that I had to today off work. It's nice to have a day to actually relax once and a while. Weekends are never long enough to both relax and get done all the usual chores.

It's that time of year: the annual miller moth migration. For me, it's like living a horror movie -- walking into the kitchen/bathroom/any room at night, turning on the light, and then screaming and running out when I realize I'm not alone.

I am absolutely terrified of miller moths. I'm perfectly aware how illogical that is, but it's this visceral gut reaction that borders on a clinical phobia for me.

And this year is turning out to be a really bad year for millers. In the past two days, we've had at least five of them in the house. Last night we went to make some burgers and had a whole flock of them fly out when we uncovered the barbecue. And there were at least thirty of them that flew out of the shed when we opened the door. It's insane. I don't ever remember them being this bad before. It's driving me crazy.

I feel a little bad for Collin, who is probably getting tired of having to get out of bed or stop whatever he's doing whenever he hears me scream. It's gotta be getting old by now.

This fear goes back a long way for me. I think its origin is way back when I was probably about four or five. My family would go to this mountain man rendezvous in Red Lodge where you dress up in period costumes and live in a tepee for a week. We parked our car in a field and left it there for the duration of the rendezvous. At the end of the week, we all got in the car to go home. My parents had me sitting between them in the front seat, and when my dad turned on the car and started to drive away, millers came flying out of all the vents. I started screaming, and I tried to crawl over my mom and get out of the car. But she grabbed my arm and held me in because we were moving. I was totally freaking out. And ever since, I've been really, really afraid of millers.

It doesn't even cross over to moths in general. It is this very specific variety of army cutworm miller moth that we have here -- dark brown with a white underbelly, about an inch long. They're even terrifying in their caterpillar stage. They're these slightly fuzzy worms that crawl up into trees and then fall out of them like little paratroopers onto people to catch rides. It's horrible. You'll be sitting under a tree in the park, enjoying your day, and a worm will all of the sudden thunk against your shoulder.

*shudder*

Title: The Heart of Everything
Fandom: La Femme Nikita
Word Count: 3096
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: No copyright infringement intended.
Characters: Nikita/Michael, Operations, Madeline, Sophie
Summary: Season 4 AU. Oversight is diverting Section resources to scour the French countryside. When Michael finds out why, he and Nikita embark on a desperate mission that pits them against both George and Operations.
See also: as posted on fanfiction.net

( Chapter 3: Family )

One of the guys I went to high school with was in a freak accident this week. He was playing softball and the ball hit him in the chest, stopping his heart. Two hospital nurses just so happened to be at the game and they preformed CPR until some fire fighters arrived who intubated him and restarted his heart. They took him to the hospital where the doctors lowered his body temperature and put him into a medically induced coma for a few days. They woke him up yesterday and as of today have moved him out of the ICU.

He's going to be fine. He'll even be well enough to get married on the 27th as planned.

The newspaper said that what happened to him is about as statistically improbable as getting hit by lightning. It happens when something hits you in the chest with just the right force, in just the right place, at just the right time (when your heart is relaxed between beats). The impact interrupts the next beat, and you fall over dead unless there's someone there to save you.

All week, I've been thinking that this really seems like the perfect story for a ten minute segment on Oprah. A man in the prime of his life, right before his wedding, struck down in a freak accident, and the two women who saved his life -- all soft lights and tears.

Also, I ordered a dress off the internet last night from some company in China. It's a navy blue silk knee-length brocade with silver cherry blossom print. The dress itself was just under $40, and $15 for shipping. It was so cheap that I'm a little suspicious. But once it gets here, if it's decent, there's another one this company has that I'm freaking in LOVE with for $70 that I'll buy.

It was sort of funny ordering it, because I had to take all of my measurements to see where I was at on their sizing chart, which is drastically different than sizes in America. In China, I'm a large girl (though, my bust happily tends more toward extra large on the Chinese scale, lol!).

If it's not a total piece of shit when it gets here, I'll post some pictures.

I am kicking novel-concept butt today! (Hence all the exclamation points to follow in this post.)

It long last I've managed to put together the last of my essentials, including:

- A city (Spina!)
- A time period (474 BC! Woo!)
- A bad guy (Two of them, actually!)
- Something for my hero to try to accomplish (I know, a plot. Right?)
- And important setting details, like what Spina actually looked like (in short: awesome!)

I love progress. :)

Just one more detail to iron out...involving a character death that I just can't decide how the poor guy should meet his end. Collin is no help. He keeps going, "Maybe he could get run over by a chariot!" Why are chariots so ubiquitous in our collective imagination of the past? Is it because we all drive cars and just can't imagine that someone would actually walk somewhere?

To get me through the 4:00 to 5:00 black hole in the space-time continuum:

List 15 books you've read that will always stick with you -- Don't take too long to think about it. The first 15 you can recall in 15 minutes.

1) Farenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
This was assigned reading for my sophomore year English class in high school, and I had never been so blown over by a book in my life. I ended up reading it twice in the span of a week. Then I proceeded to go out and read everything else by Ray Bradbury I could get my hands on. Something about the way he writes really works for me. I've never liked a writer's style as much as I like Bradbury's.

2) Dracula by Bram Stoker
Again in my sophomore year of high school, I sat down to read this for my English class. I picked up a really thick, heavily annotated version at the local library. And the constant annotations provided me my first glimpse of what you could get by really digging into a text the way I would eventually in college.

3) The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. by Washington Irving
I read this book for a project I was doing on Washington Irving junior year of high school. The copy I got out of the basement of the local library was tiny -- about the size of a 3x5 photograph. It was a fantastic little volume and contained all of Irving's most famous works. Not only was I completely charmed by Irving, but I was charmed by the physical book itself in a way I haven't been by any copy of a book since.
( Cutting the rest for length )

We're taking part in a neighborhood wide garage sale this weekend, so I've spent a few evenings this week digging through closets and the basement for stuff we want to get rid of. There's been a few surprising discoveries.

For instance, I found a pair of sunglasses that my dad owned in the seventies and gave to me at some point to wear with a Halloween costume. They're just starting to come back in style, actually...as frightening as that seems. I also found a folder filled with pictures torn out of magazines from my junior high days. They were all numbered, categorized, and had various annotations. Scary. I didn't really like brushing up against my fifteen year old self like that.

Another thing I found that surprised me was a bizarre shoe box filled with really, really terrible romance novels from the Stop N Swap Book Shop. I picked one up last night and started to read it because the synopsis on the back was too good to be true. This book is absolutely insane. Let me paraphrase what has happened in it so far:

It's the 1860's, and ex-circus entertainer Clint has gotten out of the circus life and opened a business transporting goods and people on wagon trains out west. One of his old circus folk friends hires him on to take himself, a group of whores, and their madame to Virginia City, MT where they're all going to start new lives as "teachers." Clint reluctantly agrees to this after circus friend reminds him that he saved Clint's life once when the circus tent collapsed.

They're about to head out when a suffragist playing a drum and wearing bloomers arrives and demands to join the wagon train. The whores don't want her along, but she weasels her way in. She is on her way to Virginia City to save a friend of hers who was "duped" into an arranged marriage.

So! The wagon train takes off. And suffragist woman discovers the whore she is riding with is actually blind and pregnant! They travel, travel, until they come upon (I swear to God I'm not making this up) another circus friend of Clint's -- a Shakespeare quoting/piano playing dwarf. Shakespeare dwarf quickly falls head over heels in love with the blind, pregnant whore.

Where I'm at in the book now, they've just gotten onto the Bozeman Trail, Clint is just starting to fall for the suffragist woman, blind whore just had her baby, and the other whores are setting up a tent every night to "diffuse tensions" with a group of rowdy cattlemen traveling along the trail with them.

This is by far the most bizarre romance novel I have ever read. And I have no idea where the hell I got it at. Well...aside from, apparently, at the Stop n Swap Book Shop.

Maybe if I finish reading it tonight, I'll sell it at the garage sale, lol! Pass on the wonderment. :D

Speaking of passing on wonderment, I'm also selling a bunch of My Little Pony doubles from my collection. It's killing me. But I need to parse it down a bit. But I think I might be stingy with who I sell them to. If some sticky fingered kid with a sucker half falling out of their mouth reaches for Dancing Butterflies...I'm going to have to be like, "I don't think she's right for you." And then I'll give them the Blossom with no tail.

The Return of Zack Morris on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon

How is this possible? The years have had no effect on this man!! All of the sudden I'm eight years old again.

Apparently, it snowed here last night. I didn't see it, and it was gone by the time I got up, but the guys on the radio were talking about it this morning. I got to work, and no one had bothered to turn the heat on over the weekend, so the office was a welcoming 59 degrees. I turned on the heat once I got there but it didn't warm up to anything resembling comfortable until mid-afternoon.

Honestly. It's June. I should not have to sit all morning at my desk, wrapped in fleece, freezing my ass off in June.

You're lucky you're so damn beautiful, Montana, or I'd up and leave you. I swear. *shakes fist*

The afternoon found me feeling a little ill. So I came home, flopped down on the couch, and finished reading my history of battle in classical antiquity book. It was excellent...much more enjoyable than I had thought it was going to be when I picked it up. After that, I had planned to move on to finishing up on The Inferno...but it seemed a bit depressing after several weeks of reading about warfare. So instead I am indulging myself a bit in a Dragonlance novel and this book I got for my birthday about the production of the La Femme Nikita tv show (Inside Section One).

I hit up fanfiction.net tonight looking for something even more foofy than Dragonlance to read, but I didn't find much that appealed to me. My interests in fan fic are getting terribly narrow. And I can't seem to find stuff that really hits the high notes for me anymore. Maybe the fandom is moving beyond the particular mix I like. It makes me feel like the cranky old fandom woman...all standing on my porch, waving my cane and yelling, "I remember the day..." and wondering WTF happened to the obligatory t-rexaur battle, Seifer's black boxers, and Squall's "..."

I love that fandom evolves. Really. And I don't want to see it devolve. But I do miss the old formula sometimes. Or...maybe not so much the formula itself so much as the feeling of it. There was a lot to discover six, seven years ago. Now it all too often leaves me with the feeling that it's all been done...and sometimes done with more heart in the past.

I guess that's nostalgia. And I'm still not actually feeling very well. So I'm going to go crawl into bed with my pulp fantasy now.

I've started posting my revision of Isle of the Crescent Moon. Currently, I have up the prologue through chapter 7 ("The Crescent").

I'm taking tonight to work through the rest of what I've got re-written so far and get it finalized. So I'm aiming to have everything through chapter fifteen up on fanfiction.net by the end of the night. But that may or may not happen.

Come to think of it...I might have forgotten to spell check one of those chapters...

Mass release is difficult for me. :-\

ETA: I now have up the prologue through Chapter 15: Dark Water. And that's going to be all for a while. I'm still working on the rest.

David Carradine has died. (Ed. Or...committed suicide? WTF!)

Pardon me while I crawl into a corner and cry.

Actually, I know pretty much nothing about David Carradine the man. But oh my God, how I loved him as Kwai Chang Caine. I grew up watching episodes of Kung Fu and Kung Fu: The Legend Continues with my dad, and we both quoted it all the time. Grasshopper. Walking across rice paper without leaving a trace. Wooden flutes. I am Caine. I will help you.

*sigh*

( Goodbye, Mr. Carradine. )

I recently came across several articles talking about how hunger activates certain survival genes that in the long run will keep you healthier longer. I'm not convinced that it's not just a matter of a good diet pure and simple, but the idea got into my head. And like everything, once it got in there, I latched onto it. So I've been letting myself get genuinely hungry for the past week or so -- waiting until after my stomach starts to growl before eating, and not eating before bed even if my stomach is growling. I have NO idea why the hell I am doing this. Because it's not very pleasant, and I don't honestly think I had a very substantial caloric intake to begin with. But the misery of it is sort of bizarrely satisfying. Like, take that Alzheimer's!

(I know in terms of weight management, it's actually supposed to be better to eat smaller portions more frequently. But weight has never been much of an issue for me, and as far as I can figure, I'm actually eating the same amount as before. I suppose I figure it's the hunger pangs themselves that make the difference? Who the hell knows.)

It's reminiscent of the conviction I got in high school that in order to overcome a cold quickly, I need to be as miserable as possible for a few days and really embrace the symptoms. Fever not in the danger zone? I didn't take anything for it. No fever? I took a really hot bath. Snot and coughing? Bring it on! You get the idea.

Maybe someday I'll get over subjecting myself to random health improvement schemes and just...start doing all the stuff that makes genuine sense. Eat more vegetables. Exercise once and a while.

Maybe someday.

Right now? My stomach's been growling for an hour. And I'm off to lunch. :)

I have spent the last few days reluctantly consumed by the game Braid, which Collin discovered on X-Box Live. It's a platform/puzzle solving game which revolves around manipulating time in various mind-bending ways. As it happens, I'm pretty good at it. Startlingly so. Though an hour or more of playing leaves me feeling like a dumb, drooling lump of putty. Still, I can't seem to stop. So I don't know if this is a recommendation or not. It is a good game. Nay! An awesome game. But it will do things to you...not all-together pleasant things. Approach with caution.

And I finally got around to watching Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Loved it to death. I haven't sent it back to Netflix yet because I keep re-watching it. So adorable. So funny. Lots of movie references. And a surprising amount of double entendres related to vegetables. What's not to love?

I've also been doing some hardcore gardening. I'm now practically running my own farm. My rhubarb bushes are gigantic. My hollyhocks look like they're getting ready to start growing flowers. The peas are up and climbing the chicken wire fence we put up for them. And the green beans are all bursting from the ground. I've got two little bitty zucchini bushes, and one massive mound of cucumbers. And...my favorite...my sunflowers are growing spectacularly fast since they came up a few days ago. I am SO excited. I haven't had a garden since I was little.

Despite all of this extracurricular activity, my revision of Isle has been coming along smoothly. I'm at the point now where I'm changing a lot -- replacing up to 80% of the content in some chapters! So the breakneck pace at which I worked last weekend probably won't cross over into this one. Still, I'm really aiming to have this project done by the end of June. Then...I'm not sure what I'll do with it. I'd like to just quietly replace my old chapters on ff.net so that a bunch of alerts don't get sent out. But I'd like to post it on LJ, too. So I'm thinking again about the possibility of a writing journal. I don't really like the concept of a writing journal though. So I'm struggling with it.

And finally, to commemorate my 1000th post, I feel like there should be some sort of eye candy component to this post. But I've got nothing. Sorry. :(

Dude. Work sucks in epic proportions today. Colorado pizza place payroll needs to be done and out in the mail by tomorrow, and they haven't even gotten me their time sheets yet, let alone all the new hire paperwork and non-operational employee hours I'm going to need. And I've got to get Mountain View Pizza's hours all entered so that I can get their new hire list out by tomorrow and proof payroll by Friday. Oh. And they're looking into buying five additional locations. (OMG. Kill me.)

So I'm...sitting here not doing anything. Because it's a little too depressing to handle this early in the morning after a long weekend.

Speaking of my long weekend, I've been having a lot of trouble recently with a seriously tight hip flexor on my right side. Walking for any extended amount of time has been making it cramp for the past several months, making grocery shopping, yard work, and even just going to meet my husband for lunch painful. I started to think that maybe work is the problem. I sit all day long at a desk, usually with my legs crossed. And my weekend is not long enough with all of the chores and sitting at my laptop, trying to get some writing done, to work out the kinks from the week. But over this past weekend, I made a point of going for long walks, doing lots of stretching...really relaxing. And what do you know! By Monday night, I was trucking around the neighborhood no problem. No pain. Not even a twinge of tightness. So it's official: my job is killing me.

And my aunt is back in the hospital again -- third time in the past month. My parents went up to visit her yesterday and said she's beginning to talk about her funeral now. My cousin said the chemo has been making her so sick that she hasn't had solid food and kept it down since Easter. I feel very conflicted about the whole thing. I don't want her to die. But...God, it's getting so miserable for her now, and I don't want her to suffer either. Cancer's one rough way to go. Talk about a long, debilitating disease.

And finally, in not quite so personal news, I went and saw Terminator: Salvation over the weekend and was pretty disappointed.

Spoilers to follow:

Collin is a big Terminator fan. So, even though I'm not, I'm very familiar with the franchise. And I am certain that I could have written a better movie than that. Terminator movies frequently have minor plot holes due to the whole time travel thing. But this one was exceptional. Skynet's insanely complicated plan to capture Kyle Reese in order to lure John Connor to them, so they could set Arnold T-800 on him in order to kill him (when they could have just shot Kyle in the head in the cattle car, thereby preventing JC from ever being born) bugged me a lot. The revival of Marcus after having his heart pulverized bugged me a lot. And John Connor getting said pulverized heart and apparently living on it for who knows how long afterward...also bugged me a lot. Not to mention the cliche kid who couldn't talk.

There was no goddamn plot in that movie. I was expecting something to tie it to T1. Anything. Some indication while they're at Skynet of the machines working on the time travel tech, any indication that the assassination of Sarah Connor plot was getting on its feet and beginning to roll. And I was really expecting Skynet putting flesh on terminators to be a big plot point. But they blew over it and moved on as if that wasn't a game changer for this war, that now the machines can blend in with the humans, that you can't tell friend from foe anymore. And I was fully expecting that with the robots advancing there, Marcus would provide the resistance their own advancement by teaching them (now that he knows what Skynet knows) how to reprogram the terminators. But none of that was ever addressed, because there was no plot to that movie. It was robots shooting at people and people shooting at robots. And that was it. At the end, you're in the same place you were at the beginning.

Anyway...we both walked out feeling like we'd seen an okay action movie, but not a Terminator movie. It won't get better than Robert Patrick anyway, let's face it.

I still have more bitching I could do. But I've got people calling with payroll now. So I'd better get my ass in gear and get this week started. Can't wait until it's Saturday again.

I am currently in my favorite place: on the swing in the backyard with my laptop, in my pajamas, enjoying the pleasant weather and the scent of the lilacs in full bloom, and getting some writing done. This is what life should be. There is nothing better.

I'm half way through my rewrite of Isle. I hope to get at least two more chapters done today. But I do have some chores I'm going to need to do eventually: mowing, planting my zucchini and cucumber seedlings in the garden, going grocery shopping, and the laundry. I can't even express how happy I am to have tomorrow off work. I've been really needing some time for myself, even an hour or two away from the constant frustration of my job will help at this point. It will be so nice to have a day with no weekend chores, no phone calls, and nobody asking me any favors.

I also got my Panther Football t-shirt in the mail. And it is awesome. Like, better than awesome. It rocks my world.

In short, life is good...for the moment. I am glad to be alive. And I wish every day could be like this.

Elizabeth Gilbert on Nurturing Creativity

Elizabeth Gilbert muses on the impossible things we expect from artists and geniuses -- and shares the radical idea that, instead of the rare person "being" a genius, all of us "have" a genius. It's a funny, personal and surprisingly moving talk.

I loved this talk. Just thought I'd share.

This has been the longest week of my life. I swear. It just keeps stretching on into infinity...

I've been spending all of my spare time lately working on rewriting Isle of the Crescent Moon. I'm astonished at how bad some of it is. And that I've apparently learned so much between then and now is one of the main reasons I keep hesitating to write anything "serious." I've got this feeling that if I just wait a few more years to do it, I won't put together some manuscript that's just going to embarrass me in the long run. But that kind of hesitation can only go on so long before it becomes self-defeating. And I think I might be hitting that point.

I have no delusions that I'm a great or gifted writer. But I do think that I'm aware enough of my own limitations now that I can at least put together a salvageable draft. There's still a lot left to learn. I know I've got some serious weaknesses. I can see them clearly, amplified in Isle: repetitive sentence structure, boring tangents, dialogue that deteriorates into nonsensical conversations, inconsistent characterization, excessive amounts of internal monologues and exposition, and a bizarre unnatural cadence to my prose that I've never quite been able to get a handle on. I could go on for pages.

But I've also noticed some strengths, even as far back as Isle. I think I've got a good sense for narration and pacing. My stories move along at a steady clip (even with the inexplicably boring scenes that tend to work their way in). And I'm generally able to work through my plots in a natural, satisfying way. I'm a decent story teller when I can work past my fear of writing endings. And I suppose that's the core talent a writer really needs to have. At least, the sort of writer I would want to be.

In any event, I think revisiting this story and working over some of my old writing, applying the new things I've learned to it, has been a good experience for me. The story itself is certainly better for the attention (and should be around a miraculous 15,000 words shorter by the time I'm done with it -- with no loss of meaningful content).

In non-writing related news, the Beartooth Pass should be reopening this weekend. Which means there is a trip to Yellowstone in my near future. I'm really looking for to it. Yellowstone is one of my favorite places in the world. I'd like to get really into it this year, drag Collin along for a little adventure in the outdoors (which he does not get nearly enough of). Ideally, I'm hoping for some trail riding, a hike down to the one of the waterfalls, feeding the chipmunks at Tower (against the rules!), and maybe a little fishing if we can cram it in. Sounds really good to me right now.

And the next town over from me has this empty jail, and they've expressed interest in housing prisoners from Guantanamo Bay. It's creating quite a stir here. A lot of people are really opposed to it for some pretty stupid reasons (like: but then their families will move here!). I can't quite decide how I feel about it. I guess I don't see them as much different from any other kind of prisoner, so I don't really mind. But it does kind of put Montana on the map in this whole war on terrorism thing, and I don't want my home to become associated with some of the things the government might elect to do to prisoners there. Still, someone has to take them. And this town has an brand new, unoccupied prison and is seriously in need of the jobs. Hard call.

Had a great writing-at-work day. Made lots of progress. Found the zone and totally got my zen on in it. Fully planning to carry that on home with me tonight and maybe knock out another additional revised chapter of Isle.

And I got some unexpected gifts at work: a $15 iTunes gift card from my boss Steve, and a hanging pot of annual flowers from my boss Nancy (some four o'clocks, marigolds, and something else small and dark purple).

So...good day for being at work. :)

Ready to head home now, flop down on my swing, and have some BBQ though.