My super-focused, productive “catching up on everything” weekend turned into a miserable “I’ve got a cold so I don’t care about anything and the world sucks” weekend instead.

Things are a bit better now, but I wasn’t able to tidy up the spare bedroom aka “writing studio,” and was barely able to work on my Writers of the Future contest story, which is due by the end of the month. At least I’ve got the thing below 10,000 words. I want to get it under 9,000 (even though the contest limit is something like 12,000 words), just because that’s where it ought to be. I’m about 1/3 of the way through, and the bigger cuts will come later, when I remove the pointless subplot about the main character interacting with a prostitute who happens to be fixated on him. The prostitute stays (in fact, the five prostitutes in the story are so cool, multi-colored like easter eggs) but the pointless flirtation that never goes anywhere gets cut. Otherwise the story is pretty much fully formed, and makes sense, and I just need to trim a bunch of words so it flows more smoothly.

Observation: plot-driven stories are so much easier to keep straight than stories that are all about how a character felt about something. Please remind me to take a break from the touchy-feely stuff and write more stories where people chase each other and fight and blow shit up.

I have two other stories that are this close to being finished, if I could just get past these two I’ve been sort of deadline-chasing on this month.

Today’s blog was going to be the “degrees of rejection” blog but this whole weekend was a washout anyway, so I’m just doing a hard reset, and we’ll move on to better things tomorrow.