Bored off my teakettle, thanks. You?

1) For those who've been reading for a while: Remember the neighbor of ours who ended up shooting his estranged wife in the head three times at the gas station on the corner, with their daughter in the back seat of the car? 25 to life. That whooshing sound you're hearing is a thousand coordinated sighs of relief. (We've since discovered that the woman was at the time the girlfriend of a recent friend of ours. I can't even imagine being in such a situation.)

2) Brought into work today by someone else for general consumption: pumpkin brownies. Oh. My. GOD. If you'll excuse me, I need to go bribe someone for a recipe.... (Speaking of which, I now have zarhooie's buttermilk pie recipe, which is why I'm now making with the happydance.)

3) Five-cent wing night at Dango's? Awesome. Five-cent wing night at Dango's with lbitw and jenphalian? Oh, hell, yeah.

4) Need Pepsi. On an IV drip, if possible.

5) For Halloween, I should go as me, only shorter.

6) Re items numbered 4 and 5, above: Sleep-deprivation's awfully fun, innit?

Only a little over 96 hours left to wait. *sigh*

NaNoWriMo is majorly breathing down my neck at this point. Yours?

The fact that I cannot set even word one of Ordinary Talismans down until the first of the month is driving me to frantic nail-biting. In the meantime, I've been taking it out on a bunch of notecards. I have them all in as tidy a stack as a detonated writer-brain can be assembled into: one card with prospective titles, the eventual winner circled; eight or so with characters' names, who they are, who they remind me of, what their salient details are; a few dozen with scenes, character and location and what happens, half-baked or no, sure to be shuffeld and re-shuffled a thousand times in thirty days; a couple with running themes to explore; and a few with brainstorms about specific plot developments and symbolism as they come up.

And last, there are two cards labeled "Random Neural Firings." This is the breeding ground for the detritus of my creative process, where I drop stray bits of imagery and loaded topics and such, waiting to be attached to the plot: Child Ballads. Photography. A disassembled antique clock. Footprints. Paper. Emily Dickinson. Speech impediments. It was here that I first found my story, hiding between "superstition" and "penitents," and it's here that I'm finding all the minor details that make the characters breathe. I'll likely not use them all, but I need the to keep me company.

Speaking of which, rafaela asked to see the note cards today (the whole stack), which I wasn't going to do until I'd started the actual typing. But I am glad beyond glad that I did, because she picked up right away that Vera, second only to the narrator in importance, hadn't really been fleshed out yet, which was a problem. We chatted about her for a few minutes, until she filled in the gaps with a name (Ste. Thérèse de Lisieux). I love Anna. I love the way she thinks.

And now I'm ready to go. Unfortunately, the calendar isn't. Gahhh...