Yeah, well I had mental surgery on Thursday, which meant two days off the blood thinner, a day and a half of getting uptight about the coming operation, forty-five minutes in the chair, a day of starving, a sleepless night of heaving because of a bad reaction to the antibiotics, and two days trying to regain some semblance of order in my daily life. That brings us to today.
Oh, yeah. I meant to say dental surgery, but I'm pretty sure I lost half my mind.
Nonetheless, I managed to get some writing done during my hazy awake times. The spreadsheet says 16000 words this week, which brings my April Camp NaNoWriMo project (Bob volume 3) to just over 26,000 words. If you end up liking it, I'll consider taking drugs before I write the next thing on my list.
Which reminds me: In order to devote April to Bob, I finished the first draft of Team Manager CHAMP! on March 31. This volume will bring the current series to a conclusion with the crew ready to start college the next day. When I get around to writing the college years, I'm pretty sure I'll start a new series. It will be a while.
In the meantime, the bug for another project has hit me. This time it will be a sixteen-year-old boy transferred out of Chicago when his father loses his job and his mother gets one. He ends up in the small town of Eby Mill, about 150 miles west of Chicago—just before you fall off the edge of the world into Iowa.
I'm spending 'non-working' time plotting and outlining for this story. I expect I'll start writing sometime this summer. I'm planning the story to be one that follows the kid into the world after school and shows what life was really like in the late 60s through the 80s. And yes, there is an actual plot to each volume in the series. We should have some fun with this one.
What else?
Well, I spent ten days up north, helping my daughter get her new house ready to move into. When I got home last Sunday, I had to put my right wrist in a brace from all the painting I'd done. The house is lovely, though, and I'll be spending at least a little time camped in their back yard this summer. I'm considering a run across the US to New England in the mid-summer, depending on whether or not I can afford the gas. Haven't seen my 86-year-old sister in Ohio in about six or seven years. Haven't made it to Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont since I started full timing. Might even head back west across Canada if there isn't another resurgence of the plague.
I think it would be a great time to visit Iowa and Illinois to research the places I'm writing about. That's always fun to do after the fact.
I plan to be back here in Vegas for next winter so I can finish getting my health fixed with a new implant, sleep therapy, and hearing review. Whoopee!
So, it's time to work on a pesky client project (yes, I still do odd jobs), and then see if I can add another 2,000 words to Bob3. Hope you all have a great week!