February

Was thinking of making February a blue month, but then I'm going to be away for a couple of night so I'll see.

9-12th of February I'll be in Hobart for the Australian Wooden Boat Festival and then working the day after. Hobart Regatta is the same weekend. It's a long weekend, Monday being Regatta Day, which is a holiday in the south; in the north we have Recreation Day in November. The Hobart Cup is the Wednesday before the weekend.

So it's a big weekend down south. Probably the biggest of the year, except maybe for the one around New Year.

That same weekend, up north, is Festivale. Launceston's annual food & wine thing in the park. On the same weekend as the WBF & Regatta down south. Did they not realise? Did they think it was a good idea?


Anyway, 24th of February, I'll going south again to go sailing. Staying overnight.

The weekend in the middle of those we'll probably have a market stall or garage sale at Evandale so I'll be away then too.

One step forward

I've been working steadily on Fox. I read through the first draft and remembered why I liked it, and fet encouraged about making it better rather than put off.

It'll be good to have another marketable novel too. There is no way I'd go back to working on Stupid Novel (aka Shadows). The plot flaws go too deep, it's unfocused, the characters aren't particularly original and the patches are showing. I realised recently that I don't really care that I won't be going back to it. In the years I was working on it, I loved these characters but, well, don't tell them, but they've been replaced. At the time, the thought that they'd languish on my hard drive and never be read by anyone else was upsetting. Now, well, I'm more annoyed I spent so long working on the thing. I'm over it. I have new favourites.

Then this morning I woke up to find it hammering me with how to fix it. I mean really fix it, not just more patch work. Characters I could revamp. Scenes I could rework to emphasis the storyline. Crap I could get rid of. Words I could use. And sentences.

And you know, I think it would work.

I had already decided to spend one day a week working on something different to stop me getting jaded with WIP so I spent today working on Shadows. What I'll be doing tomorrow, I'm not sure.

I'm starting to feel sympathetic to those smokers who think they've managed to quit smoking.