Cracking Eggheads

I enjoyed a beautiful afternoon on Alki and banged out 300 words.  More importantly I feel like writing again.  The second novel is starting out with a definitively dark tone and I'm going to have to pull it back from the abyss a bit to keep it safely in YA-land.  I might need to write a little bit on the contemporary fiction project just to get the darkness out of my system, but then again - darkness seems to be the coloration that sells novels best these days.

I hate Microsoft Word with the heat of ten-thousand suns. I haven't lost any work, but it decided to crash on me around page sixty-six. I don't trust it. Although, since the editing service I used sends results in Word using Word's "Track changes" mode, I'm pretty much stuck with it for this edit. I wasn't able to figure out how to get Scrivener to automatically sync with a word document and I need to remind myself to suggest that functionality to the developers. It should be possible, since it all ready can sync with rich text, plain text and Final Draft documents. Once I'm done with the edit, I'm literally going to copy-paste each section back into the Scrivener project. This will be an annoying and tedious task to be sure, but one that I feel will give more flexibility as I move forward with the final version for publication. It's definitely a gap in the smooth workflow I had imagined. Perhaps next time I'll find an editor that ...

I'm staring at the Space Needle wondering how John Grisham did it.  I'm told he wrote his first novel while working full-time in a law firm.  His bio on his website confirms this information.  I don't like 5 AM.  I like this hour.  Between 3:30 and 4:30 AM nearly the entire world is quiet.  If anything breathes,  or snores as the case may be,  you hear it.  The house pops and re-adjusts as it loses heat and your thoughts echo like tympani drums with each satin stroke of a key. That said,  this hour is unreasonable by any sane intellectual measure.  No civilized thought resides here in the dark, only the wild abandon of far more rational people than I dreaming away their day's problems.  No, this is the hour of mad men heated beyond the polite conventions of society,  wrestling dreams only slightly more tangible into being. This unsustainable, delicious hour has to be enjoyed as the rare treat that it is - with only th...