Standing, Sitting, Zero Hour, The Starving Years and PsyCop

Wow, I'm almost through editing Zero Hour. I think I underestimated that story, as I thought of it like a bunch of randomness that I had forced into a semi-sensible plot. But reading it all at once really surprised me. It's a better story than I gave it credit for being, and now in edits where I get to weave it together more solidly, tie up loose ends, and really get the themes to shine, I'm really tickled with it.

I mentioned my standing desk experiment in my last newsletter, and actually I did 90% of the Zero Hour edits standing up. And my feet kinda hurt! Even with the anti-fatigue mat. I figured out that I could make Scrivener Windows Beta and Scrivener Mac 2.0 play nice if I kept the files on a thumb drive. (Getting Windows and Mac Scrivener to work on the same project seems to be one of its bugs at the moment.) I'm on the last scene I'd like to add and I pulled it back to my sit-down Mac station for some reason. Who knows why the subconscious works the way it does? And then it should be off to neyronrose   for edits. Probably tomorrow.

And then I get to dig in to the GhosTV edits with all the beta readers' notes and the really awesome field trip I did last Saturday to a Yoga center in Madison for an all-day retreat. I feel like I should lay it out there that my views on New Age religions (or really, they're older Eastern religions) and Vic's don't exactly align, and a lot of the stuff that sounds perfectly good to me, he finds phenomenally offensive and dumb and annoying. Just sayin'.

A lot of the stuff that my retreat leader said sounded interesting to me...but I can't wait to slip some of it into GhosTV and watch Vic blow a gasket.

GhosTV is a 100% sitting project. Maybe it's too complicated to stand and write at the same time.

And then soon I'll be able to write another couple chapters of The Starving Years, which, again, I'm way more pleased with than I would have hoped. Voting on the next part closes 1/30, though one reader (Tracy G) gave me an idea for how to use a combo of two of the votes that I will probably go with, since one of those two is well in the lead. Though I won't have time to work on it before 1/30 so I'll see how the votes go. This month's smexy installment is a culmination of 40,000 words of longing looks and flirting (yay!) and now I want to write sex, sex, sex til the end of the book...but I must restrain myself, because that would drag down the plot. And it's actually a quite plotty story. It's also a standing-up story. No idea why. (My brain insists on spinning a really naughty sex scene, so I'm sure it'll find a way to make it happen somewhere.)

I will probably stop doing the voting thing if response numbers dip too low--it doesn't make logical sense for me to bend my schedule around something that's being participated in by too few readers. I get the impression that most people wouldn't mind too much if that happened, they're just reading to see where the story goes.