cleolinda | Tuesday night, headachy

1. I fought off several attacks of The Blahs today, but ended up getting a lot done. I'm trying to sort out the first three chapters at this point--rearranging the old material into logical concert with the new, and so on. Let's put it this way: I wanted to finish this by my birthday, December 14. Today is November 13. I'm not going to do the actual math, but we're talking twenty chapters that have to be filled out and whipped into shape in roughly thirty days. When you consider that I won't be able to write every single day (that's just Murphy's Law talking. Also, you've got Thanksgiving, and I know at least one or two days will be given over entirely to midnight-showing Golden Compass squee), and that I'd probably like to have a little time just to revise things on a word-by-word level... we're talking one chapter per day. Some chapters'll probably take an hour's run-through; the last chapter is going to involve a lot of raw drafting. Really, I just want to have it in a complete, readable format so I can show it to some close friends and, hopefully, my agent, with the understanding that I can still polish it at my leisure and double-check some research details for a little while, while it's shopping around. I've been working on it for four years now--I'd like to give it six months in a drawer, but it had a year or two in a drawer, unfinished, as it was.

But it's an arbitrary deadline. I made it up. Why is it such a big deal?

Because I'm going to be twenty-nine, which is almost thirty, and this is what I've wanted to do my entire life--write novels and, with any luck, publish them--and I haven't done it yet. If I don't draw a line at some point, any point, when is it ever going to get done? This point's as good as any other point.

2. Unfortunately I have a headache now, but it comes with the territory.

3. Questions that are not the most helpful to ask a writer: "So... who's the audience?" "Uh... people who like to read this kind of thing?"

4. I'm saying this here so as not to pick on any one person, but: ARGUING IN CLEO'S JOURNAL BAAAAD.

5. In other housekeeping issues, enough people are emailing me about the Free Rice thing (which I linked!) that it sounds y'all want a little graphic at the bottom of the page. I'm worried about reaching a saturation point with the reminder graphics, though, so I'm thinking of combining all the click-a-day sites into one graphic. Would this work for people? There's tabs at the top of the Hunger page to the others.

Linkspam:

It's a horrible story, but if you've got kids on MySpace, you need to read this: MySpace faked by enemy's parents drives 13-year-old to suicide.

She told the Meiers that Josh Evans was created by adults, a family on their block. These adults, she told the Meiers, were the parents of Megan's former girlfriend, the one with whom she had a falling out. These were the people who'd asked the Meiers to store their foosball table.

The single mother, for this story, requested that her name not be used. She said her daughter, who had carpooled with the family that was involved in creating the phony MySpace account, had the password to the Josh Evans account and had sent one message - the one Megan received (and later retrieved off the hard drive) the night before she took her life.

"She had been encouraged to join in the joke," the single mother said.
The single mother said her daughter feels the guilt of not saying something sooner and for writing that message. Her daughter didn't speak out sooner because she'd known the other family for years and thought that what they were doing must be OK because, after all, they were trusted adults.

On the night the ambulance came for Megan, the single mother said, before it left the Meiers' house her daughter received a call. It was the woman behind the creation of the Josh Evans account. She had called to tell the girl that something had happened to Megan and advised the girl not to mention the MySpace account.