Peanut butter Jelly time!

Yesterday was national peanut butter and jelly sandwich day, so of course I celebrated by having a gooey,  sloppy PB&J.  My favorite is made with raspberry and the peanut butter so thick you can almost not eat it.  It takes a lot of milk.

I had other plans for this week, but I find myself back at my desk with my computer turned off, plotting out another book.  Fortunately I can use a lot of the prewriting research that I did for the first book I plotted out since I'm setting this new one in the old timeframe.  Sunrise, -set, moonrise -set, moon phase, average temperatures are all the same.  And even the first chapter I wrote can be used with a little tweaking.  Even so, I'm not really happy with that first chapter.  It's not unusual for my first chapter to be completely rewritten between rough draft and submission, so I try not to get too uptight about it and simply use that first chapter as a way to get into the story.  Fix it later.  :-)  I've got a very rough character grid sketched out, and a rough day-by-day breakdown of what I want to see.  Today I'll be taking that and fleshing it out into real chapters, hopefully bringing in some of the fun stuff I wanted to do.  Again, it feels skimpy, but I've got a couple of new, unexpected characters, and that always shakes things up.

I bugged out of the office an hour early yesterday so I could weed out a few of the landscape beds.  It felt good to get my dirt pants on and my face turned to the ground–and the physical labor forced a few ideas out into the open where I can work with them today.  I told Guy I was yanking the dandelions from around the bushes so we can leave them where they belong in the yard, and he wasn't amused.  I believe his exact words were "We're not going to make wine out of them!"