Recently back from a ten-day vacation where nary a word of writing got done (no computer access and no time for longhand) and seems the long break did me good. Yesterday I basically finished Revised Draft 1 of the Controlled Burn proposal, although I think I need to move things around. It will mean losing my precious opening sentence, but I can replace it with an equally strong one--and this change will allow me to add a Very Important Plot Point to those critical fifty pages.

This revision is far more complex than I realized it would be, about a 75% rewrite rather than a mere revision. What happened is the editor who's interested in the proposal pointed out a Plothole in my original version, and my method of fixing it means several changes from the original timeline. And once that happened, I found other things that would just be improved by a fresh start. I think I knew in my heart that CB was a good first draft that needed to be approached pretty much from scratch, but until I got a nibble on it, I didn't have the impetus, or perhaps the cojones, to tackle it.

Today, I realized that the deadline for a certain erotic romance novella anthology (the new volume of Ellora's Cavemen) was fast approaching--and that something languishing in my "I lost momentum on this one" file might suit. So I decided to poke at it a bit for a lark.

3500 words later, I'm more than half done and know how the rest of it will play out.

I've also been working on scheduling and prioritizing, trying to use some of what I learned in Atlanta to help me write more efficiently. It's tough. Just listing out the various projects I'm working on, as me and as half of Sophie Mouette, is a bit overwhelming, or could be if it weren't also exciting.

Now I just need to remember to schedule in the editorial work, the housework, and chiropractic visits. Oh, and poetry. And promotional stuff. And oh, breathing, exercising, socializing, petting the cats, and of course, sex. (Yes, in case you were curious: sometimes writing about it gets in the way of actually having it.)

But all in all, I'm a couple of days back from a pleasant vacation and I'm blissfully happy to be back at work. How cool is that?

Tomorrow--editing-for-pay, editing-for-love, making some minor revisions on a Sophie story, more work on the novella, and crank out a new short that's all there in my head.