July 27th, 2003

There’s some things I’ve forgotten to post. Many others I just haven’t gotten to yet. I have several papers with lists in my laptop bag and somehow I’ll have to combine them all and talk about them here, only by then the things I’m referring to all will all be out of date. Like I never wrote about eating at the Vietnamese place in D.C. when I visited Esthela back in March. Or how Sophia fell down the stairs then. I never wrote about Sophia playing with the dice so intently three gaming sessions ago. Neither did I write about the morning, almost a month ago, when Sophia said a full sentence to me, as if she’d been doing it all along. There’s also the phenomenon of the ever-increasing drafts to contend with. These are half-written posts that I save to drafts because they aren’t finished and then they kind of end up just languishing there. Currently I have one titled “Strange Pronouncements”, and one titled “The Internet is a Gift to Losers Everywhere”. There’s an untitled one too, which is the second run of that brilliant post my blog ate about six weeks ago. It was on a somewhat current topic then, but now it hardly seems worth finishing. And of course, for those waiting with bated breath for the second installment of the story on my co-worker, that’s in drafts too. Unfinished. I don’t know why there’s always more that I have to say than I quite manage to get to. I suppose that’s better than having nothing to write about, but it is a bit frustrating. I guess I’m officially old now, because I feel like I don’t have enough time left for all that I need to do.

So it’s been decided. My draft of Cualcotel is going to stay here while I go on vacation. It’s still not done. November is soonish and I have only the vaguest vaguety vague idea of what to do this year (and last year’s work is 3 scenes short of being finished, still). I told myself I’d firm the new idea up in September, only today I had a panic attack thinking about it because I wondered whether it would really qualify as a novel. It’s a series of short stories! Not a novel! Aaaaaagghhhh! Although actually, I hope it’s really better connected than “a series of short stories”. I really want it to be a novel. We’ll see whether it cooperates.

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