When we left our saga yesterday, my traitorous Magic 8 ball had just delivered a message to the dummy on the other end: Write something else, stupid!

Fine! I'll show you--I'm gonna kick that little black sphere with pretensions to divination to hell and gone.

So I wrote.

A new short story... or at least the first two of probably five scenes. Unlike most of my shorts, I have an idea of where it's going. I just don't know how my heroine axes the six space pirates. But she's going to, somehow.

I'm taking suggestions, however, for their demise. The stranger, the better. Or, if you have mechanical experience on spacecraft, I'd love to interrogate you.

One catch: the heroine must survive. She has a wedding to attend--her cousin's. Where the husband-to-be is the man that dumped her for the cousin.

Where in the rules does it say that the torture must end with the story?

A glimpse of my plucky protag and what she fears the most:

Esme Roesi hurried along the corridor to her ship, dodging between stevedores with their loads of materiel and the passengers headed for embarkation. Shouts rebounded off the high ceilings, tortured machinery squealed, and laden pallets boomed as they dropped. Sibu Station was busier these days, and she was grateful. Novelty beat her latest routine--dancing attendance on her mother and any reminders of Nico.

She counted to twenty as the beeps grew in volume, her boot heels thumping rapidly against the floor, and then answered. "Mother."

Those wishing to stick it to some pirates know where to find me.

Another 800 words cranked out on that short, but with added angst and hair-pulling.

No, I guess I don't know what exactly happens in her first physical run-in with those tricksy pirates, and I've got to work on visualizing that colony much better. But mostly with the actual happenings, kthx, brain. Could you work on that while I'm herding small children into the Civic Arts Center and praying like hell my worst nightmare--they'll all want to hit the bathroom at once--won't happen?

The bathroom scenario in a sold-out show with an entire school going to the same performance, followed by a trip to a local park with perhaps, two or three toilets in the girls' bathroom, is the stuff of well-written horror.

But no one ever writes about that. Gee. I wonder why. :P

I got the reject I was angsting for, and that settled me right now. With a few minor changes, it's out to another market, and we'll see if there's any overlap in terms of commentary. If there is, I'll revise. Right now, I have one opinion, and I'm not quite ready to rip and rewrite based on that one alone.

So yeah, I'm keeping the balls in the air. So far.

And just when I'm feeling good about word count, I realize that the total divided by three months isn't anything more than my average output.

It's a good thing my brain smacks me every so often. At least, this way I don't get to suffer from Over-Inflated Head Syndrome.

Writing? Ha. Claiming so would be a big fat lie.

Bread-and-butter making? Repeatedly. Four days this week, to be exact. And I don't think I've ever been quite so grateful to finish up with an arts/crafts project.

However the kids were amazed, delighted, and some curiously uneducated by the experience. My favorite 'recipe' of how to make butter at home was:

You put milk and egg in a jar and shake.

Did you see me use an egg, boys and girls?

I thought not.

Several were prepared to head home and demand fresh-made butter, however incorrectly. (Yes, Mom, first you put water in that jar, and then you mix in cottage cheese and sour cream and banana and mashed potatoes, and then you shake. For a long, long time. Or, perhaps some of them did get my peculiar emphasis on whipping cream, so their recipe would include a red can of whipped cream, shoot it into that jar, and shake.)

Gosh, I hope the majority of those parents have a clue.

I have a BBQ in my future--pretty soon too. That starts at noon. Before then, I must:

Clean the kitchen. (Yes, because all the chefs in the house snuck out the door to work, damn them.)
Crit three stories.
Slush, so others may slush ever onward. I would never deny them the pleasure.
And, somewhere in and around the time I have, catch up on housework.

Oh, and by the way, stare at the taxes some more.

I am hoping that somehow the today's hours morph into several extra.

Meanwhile the doors upstairs are swinging in the breeze and banging, and do the dogs notice? No. We could have burglars, and they would sleep through the visit, or lift their heads long enough to see if the burglars would produce food, then fall back to the ever-dozing stage.

But I had to be upright at 6A or their day is not complete.

Okay, so I settled down to write, reread what I had on the short, tweaked a few things as I always do on a reread, and added some words--and the phone rings.

A child. It's always a child. The dogs would use the phone if they could just get their nails to hit the right buttons. I answer, you see. It's a failing.

But this child has plans for dinner! Big plans! (Seeing that it's his brother's birthday on Monday, and sibling is in town.) And has invited seven other people to come over for dinner.

Nothing was prepared. Nothing. And he didn't get off work until 5P, so some of that prep was up to me.

I abandoned the writing, sad to say. One of the invitees was birthday boy's girlfriend's mother, so yeah.

Suffice to say, after some argument ("No, it's too hot to do sweet potatoes in the oven, I'll make potato salad, though." and "No, it's too hot to use the oven for shortbread. Buy some." And we still used the oven because they came home with pie crusts instead. Dagnabit, kids, it was 95 today!) and inevitable lessons on things like how to deconstruct a whole chicken into recognizable parts, followed by defensive replies like, "But I was vegan or vegetarian for the last five years!"), we wrapped up the food, including the gazpacho and a salad with not-quite-ripe-enough mango, nuts, and feta, the guests arrived, and everyone ate. But not enough, because there are leftovers of everything.

This little interruption explains my inability to achieve crits, too.

Well, that and the nap which I took because the heat made me groggy.

But today is filled (so far) with no excuses. Taxes are on the list, as well as housework. Crits, too, but I'll have to wriggle those in as best I can during my breaks.

But no nap. Not even if it is the forecasted 95 again. I only have time for one nap per weekend at best.

Which gives me a good reason to drink another vat of coffee.

So let's take an in-depth eagle-eyed look at exactly what I achieved this weekend in no particular order:

A whole 200 words.
Two crits.
Fruit salad.
Sang two masses.
Research on hydrocarbons and petroleum engineering.
My share of the taxes.
A short nap
A dinner for eight pulled out of my ass.
And cleaning the kitchen. Three times. And it's exploded again for another camper returned.

*eyes list critically*

Best of all, I did not kill any children! Go me!

Yeah, yeah. I'll celebrate when I get home today by scrubbing a bathroom.

You would think I'd have more words, at least. But no. The tax prep sucked writing time. Unlike the children, however, taxes only arrive on your doorstep once a year.

For tonight's trick, there should be some words. More than 100, but less than 500, unless I surprise the hell out of myself. In addition, my class begins their first major writing project: a short story. Page 1, characters, page 2, setting, page 3, problem, and page 4, resolution.

I'm taking bets on how many kill off their characters. (Kinders have no constraints when it comes to killing a character if said death amuses them.)

Of course, they have no restraint if you're standing in their way as they're barreling through, either. On foot or via wheels (aka tricyles) they will run you over without a second thought, leaving treadmarks on your back.

Life is good again.

My computer is not making noise, the car is (although I'm not listening to it at the moment) and Friday is over.

Singing and confirmation went well last night, even with the unplanned, impromptu addition of four songs--only three of which we knew. Ohhhhh-kay. I let the director take that first half of the opening verse while I made damn sure I had the timing right. It's not so much the sight-reading of notes that I have issues with, but rhythm. Maybe if I'd only taken those piano lessons four or five or ten years longer.

Due to computer issues (a high-pitched whine and internet connections earlier in the week) I spent little time on the computer. Which was okay, really. Except for the part where I didn't write.

I've been reading instead. Currently I'm in the midst of Julie Czerneda's Beholder's Eye, and thoroughly enjoying the multiplicity of aliens she invented. Also, I love the way that as this particular alien morphs into the other races, she takes on the intrinsic characteristics of each. Halfway through, and while I'm not reading compulsively, I'm reading and not skipping.

Much work yesterday--not nearly enough around the house, because I ended up lettuce-leaf limp. And it was cold. Freezing, apparently, based on the shivers and my need to wrap in blankets.

While a week or so ago it was the in the 90's? Make up your minds, weather gods!

I worked for a while on my new website look (don't expect anything soon), managed lots of research on hydrocarbons, and worked the story past the spot where I had to begin yesterday.

Then I remembered to check my KIAPosse schedule, and of course, I'm up next week for another chapter. Ooooooooookay. Guess what I'm working on tonight and maybe most likely tomorrow, and possibly into Tuesday?

I read until 1A, a new-to-me author, iirc, and finished the darn book that I'd started at 9P. This morning I'm tired and still a bit annoyed by the typos that no one managed to fix. How does someone miss an 'it's' that should be 'its'? Or a possessive form of the noun that was meant to be merely a plural? (The third thing I don't remember exactly, but it was a spelling error.) Do people blink or what? I can be ripping along and these kinds of mistakes just zing me.

Yeah, maybe I was a copyeditor in a former lifetime. (In a monastery, where I was in charge of the monks doing illumination and transcription. "I don't care that the illumination for this page took you two years, you have a mistake in the middle of that page. Do it again.")

Should I blame the nuns? I know I did a lot of diagramming and spelling in seventh and eighth grade. Thank heavens we gave up diagramming in high school.

And thankfully, despite the fewer hours of sleep, I'm feeling perky. Enough to get me through a ton of housework and to whip others into a frenzy with me.

Right after I have another cup of coffee, that is. Or two.

After a full day of zoo fieldtrip, followed by a one-hour IEP that began an entire hour later than originally scheduled, I arrive home, fling open the car door, and hear the high-pitched yelps of a dog. Mine, d'oh. Why are they locked outside?

I enter, drop the assorted items, and open the sliding glass doors. The dogs race in, the short one barking excitedly because Mom! Home! Treat! are the first things that spring to his small mind.

Then I see the Slug's note on the slider.

Mom! Don't let Harley in with his dead bird.¹ He found it in the yard, dragged it in, maggots and all. Thus the vacuum.

I turn in horror to the heretofore innocent-appearing vacuum that now harbors maggots. I swear it shrugs. Or maybe that's just the maggots wiggling in its tummy.

I turn back to the note.

Harley and the bird are outside now, but I couldn't get the bird away from him. So DON'T LET HIM BRING IT BACK IN.

Love,
The Slug

WTF! I have maggots in the vacuum and a dog who attempts to kiss me with those very same lips/tongue that have now lovingly carried around a dead bird filled with maggots for god-knows-how-many hours.

Happy Friday.

*pulls out the gin and pours*

¹This would be the bird he caught three days ago that we could not wrest from his jaws, nor find his hiding place for it.