so, no, i haven’t actually been sick for the last 4 weeks, but i have been slow in getting back here. why? well, it’s the end of the semester, so teaching gets busier, and i’ve been fighting with a particularly insidious little problem in the web work which keeps feeling like three steps forward and two steps back.

i have also not stopped typing (RoE) and writing (new short story, untitled, lots of fun!). i haven’t always done as much as i’ve wanted to, but i’ve done it. there’s more to that, but i don’t have much time right now.

why not? because when i finished writing the first draft of Running on Empty back on the 22nd of March, i told myself i would have it all typed in by the end of the semester, which was almost 8 weeks away, then.

well, today is the final day of classes, so this is it. since i don’t have to teach today, i have a fighting chance of getting the last 39 handwritten pages typed up.

39 pages typed up in 1 day?

yep.

but that’s nearly 14000 words!

yep.

you’re delusional.

well, perhaps, but not so much in this case, because i recently purchased a copy of Dragon Naturally Speaking and, while it’s certainly not perfect:

begin quote get up comma end quote he snapped at Gleason comma still holding tight to the man’s ankle period begin quote get up exclamation point end quote

equals:

“Get up,” he snapped at Gleason, still holding tight to the man’s ankle. “Get up!”

i’ve gotten rather used to it, and it to me, so i can do more than a 1500+ words in an hour when things are going well.  of course, there are also days when i only manage 1500 in a whole day because I need to revise a plot point that no longer makes sense or i have to spend time finding and aligning various puzzle pieces i’ve left for myself in the writing.

this weekend, though, i worked my way through the last major (i hope) and the rest is a wild race to the climax, which should go relatively smoothly.

but not if i don’t get started!