Whipping the WIP

Or is it whipping me?

Lesson Learned: Never announce on a public forum that you WILL have your work in progress finished by such-and-such date. Because unless you’re working to an editor-set deadline and have no choice but to deliver the project by said date, odds are something will happen to trip you up. Trip me up, anyway.

I’m still writing and revising the last few scenes of my mystery romance. No excuses, really, other than Elle Muse kept wanting me to change the villain at the last moment. It didn’t make a whole lot of sense to change the villain, but because she kept hankering about it, of course I had to spend tons of subconscious thought time subconscious-thinking about it. Not to mention the additional conscious thinking time. I don’t know about you, but all that subconscious- and conscious-thinking time impacts on my writing progress. In the end, I went with my original villain. Thanks a lot, Elle Muse!

Then, as a result of the crappy economy, My Liege has begun working four-day weeks, using his amassed holidays to enjoy wonderful long weekends every weekend. Which is great! But when everyone else in the family is having a long weekend, it’s much harder to treat Mondays like work days.

Eldest Son returned home from university two or three weeks ago. He started his summer job on Tuesday, and Youngest Son began his college summer session last week. So, as of this week, with both kids absent from the house during the days, and with the little exception of having M.L. around Monday mornings (he usually golfs in the late mornings, so I can get some work done then), I’m finally back to making decent headway on this book. If I weren’t wise enough to follow my own advice, I might even declare that I WILL finish writing/revising this book by the end of next week. But I’m not that foolish, no. You’ll just have to keep checking in and see.

So, about the American Idol finale last night. Kris Allen won, as my buddy Shelinda predicted. I expected him to win, just like last year I expected David Archuleta to win. But I was still hoping Adam Lambert would win, just like last year I hoped David Cook would win (and he did!). I wished Kris had shown a bit more excitement about winning. Instead, he appeared to be in shock and did that Aw-shucks-it-should-have-been-Adam thing. You won, buddy! Soak it up!