Word count: 7,875

Not very pleased with that, but whatever. I'm going to bed now. More to come later!

And did you check out that excerpt? I told you it was crazy crap -- and you haven't seen the half of it.

Hey all -- haven't really gotten any work done on the novel yet today, but I did come home and sleep for a few hours, so hopefully I'll have the energy to buckle down and make some gains on it right now. Shooting for 8K+ before I sleep, but I'll be thrilled if I break 9K. We'll see. I did update the word count and post an excerpt in my user profile, though, so feel free to have a look at that. I'll post a much longer excerpt RIGHT HERE IN THE BLOG this weekend! Or maybe I'll post it on Scary-Crayon. I dunno. In any case, I will be posting that somewhere. Soon. So stay tuned!

And do feel free to comment on my "political" ramblings below -- I'd like to know that at least something in there made sense. 🙂

Rather than combine my political musings with my answers to Val's questions in one long entry, I figured I'd post them separately. So this installment will deal (briefly) with the current sitch.

In the wake of Bush's reelection, amidst the gloomy comments by folks who voted for Kerry and desperately wanted Bush out of office (I feel your pain), I've seen a number of concluding remarks that note the current, divided state of the nation and, after calling for a day or so of mourning, urge us all, as Americans, to unite under and lend our support to President Bush -- because like it or not, we're stuck with the guy for another four years. Which is exactly the problem, and which is why I'm not optimistic about The Great American Divide being healed any time soon. (more...)

Dig it! Back later today with my answers to those questions, and maybe a few notes on the election and political sitch as well -- in particular, the apparent notion going around the right-wing blogs that having voted for Kerry means that one lacks and/or doesn't care about moral values. But I need to get to sleep so I can wake up for work in the morning, so I'll say more about it later. Ja.

Word count: 6,235

Now, don't go getting all impressed, because The Absolute Strangest Christmas Story Ever Told is a mess of insane crap. At this point, it's not even about Christmas. And you can bet that 2K+ words deal with that very fact. But it will be, eventually -- and I expect the transition itself to take betweek 2K and 3K words. Like they say on the NaNoWriMo website, this challenge is about quantity, not quality. If quality were the goal, the window would be a lot longer than a month. But it's not, so I'm writing lots of insane crap to make it to 50K. I'll probably post an excerpt in the coming days, but in the meantime here's a link to a really old blog post I wrote back in September of 2002 that still exists on archive.org. The novel in progress, while different as far as subject matter goes, possesses the same strange and random character of that entry.

I've already begun to answer Val's three questions, but since I'm obviously not going to finish that before I leave here in the next few minutes, I'll have to post those answers after I get off from the bookstore -- or even tomorrow from the job, depending on how tired I am. In any case, look for those tomorrow.

As well as a new bookstore episode of Scary-Crayon's Dusty Plastic HELL: Hot Flash!

Oh, and curse these fucking election results.