My college campus was a stop on the commuter rail. You’d hear the whistle as the trains came and went, back and forth, shuttling people into the city in the mornings and back out again at night. Sometimes I’d be in class when that whistle would sound, and my mind would drift, wishing I was on my way in to Boston.

The city seemed so exciting to me, maybe because I’m from a small town. Maybe because I remember when I was small, my mother worked here in what we called “the Pregnant Building” for the way the bottom floors bumped up and out, then went back in. Even now, when I have a dream about walking in Boston, I almost always see that building there somewhere.

As I came out of Government Center yesterday, something about the air and the early morning light caught me up and sent me back to that. I can’t define it much more than this: it was one of those days that, if I’d been back in college, I’d absolutely have ditched classes and rode the train into town, like I did a few times back in the day. The air was cool, summer fading towards fall, clear blue sky promising a day that would be warm but not too hot. I wanted to go ramble through bookstores around Harvard Square and have lunch on the plaza in front of Trinity Church.

Instead, I had to keep going, across the street and into work. Stupid grown-up responsibilities.

I’ve worked in Boston for nearly nine years, and I’m not sick of it. The commute gets to me, sure, but that’s because the time I’m physically spending in Boston isn’t spent exploring the city.

One of my several writing projects is a story that takes place (at least at the beginning) in Boston. I’m realizing that when I ran it as a game several years ago, I didn’t really need to know the layout of the streets too accurately - my players were forgiving enough (and some were probably less knowledgeable about the city’s geography than I was.) Now that I’m working towards putting this in front of a larger audience (someday, maybe), that’s an aspect I’d like to make sure I get right.

Fairly early on, there’s a chase that begins in the North End. It’s ultimate destination is Cambridge, but the end of the flight can certainly end well before that. I’d like to try walking the paths the characters will take, or part of it, since I really don’t plan on travelling through sketchy alleys and hopping fences and getting arrested for trespassing. I’ll be bringing the camera along if I do this, so you’ll probably find yourselves on a photographic walking tour/preview sort of thing one of these days.

While I’m at it, might as well toss out a bit of a writing update, too. Anna’s backstory is finally done, which is nice. Took her long enough to tell it. Though, in finishing it, I was reminded of the intrinsic value of a good walk for unravelling plot threads. I was so close to finishing the final scene when it was time to shut down for the day. And, as much as the story was done, the way I was ending it felt too abrupt. So I got up, walked away, and played it out in my head on the way to the train.

I don’t even think I was out of the building before the true ending - the right one - came to me. From there, it was just a matter of spinning out the dialogue and typing it up. The final word count ended up over 17,000 words, 27 pages if I were to print it out. A bit longer than I’d intended, but a few scenes that I hadn’t originally planned demanded to be written, and I think they made the story better.

So, now on to outlining this new-old project (oh god, outlining. /hate). But one thing I’ve learned is, any time I’ve picked it up, I’ve gotten stuck on a particular scene. It’s something that needs to be there, but for whatever reason, I get the characters there and just… stall. In an hour of outlining it, though, I think I might have worked through the problem.

It was also kind of heartening, when I dusted off my old game notes (you don’t want to know the length of that file), I looked at a lot of the stuff I’d forgotten and thought, y’know? This isn’t half-bad.

So, there’s one thing getting a bit of a second wind, plus Lil, who’s rolling her eyes at me from her short story, a revisit of “Kate” sometime soon, and only about a hojillion things I owe other people for Davien, Threnn and Anna.

It’s a good kind of busy.

Today is Tuesday, but it’s Monday-like for me, since I was home sick yesterday.

You see, Sunday, my mother rode in a Dressage show. (I took many pictures. I will unload the camera later and show off the horse who is competing with me for maternal affection.) I showed up at 8:30 AM in a tank top. Yes, I had sunscreen on. I didn’t think the day would get hot as fast as it did, so my only real covering was a wool army surplus shirt, which I figured I’d be wearing for a few hours.

Nope. It was hot as all get-out, and that bad cat came off by 8:45.

So, there I am, running around, taking pictures in the sun for, oh, six hours.

Yeah, I got a wee bit pink. Nay, worse than that. I will go so far as lobster-tastic.

I’ve had worse. Oh, believe me, I’ve had worse.

But! My mom did great, even though her judge was a wee bit harsh. This woman is, as my mom puts it, “Classical.” So if you get something even a little bit wrong, that’s it. No leeway, no sugar-coating.

Still, she took home a ribbon. Fourth place in her group, I believe. And I think she was more shaky than she usually would be. Because, about an hour before her ride, she got thrown.

I didn’t even see it happen - she was riding around like everyone else, warming up. I must have been looking at another horse, or trying to take a picture of someone. I heard a thump in the direction she’d gone, but when I looked, she was standing beside Cisco. I thought she’d just dismounted for some reason.

She came back to where Greg and I were standing and said, “He doesn’t usually do that.”

Me: “Do what?”

Her: “You…didn’t see that?” Cue my mom’s “Oh shit, I shouldn’t have said that” look.

Me: “Nope. What happened?”

Turns out, someone had put up one of those little awning things, made out of blue tarp. The wind caught it just as she rode by, and the flapping made Cisco spook. She thought for a couple of seconds there she was still on - almost righted herself, then he did a little swerve thing and off she went. But she really did bounce right back up, her butt a little grass-stained, her pride a little hurt, but otherwise okay.

Go mom.

So, I ran around in the sun (for some reason, I thought there was more shade there…) and by 2:30, I was ready to go the hell home. I don’t think I realized the sad state of my shoulders until I got in the car and felt the air conditioning come on. I drank enough water to drown a small country, but I still woke up feeling bleh on Monday. I stayed home from work.

So, of course, today is Monday-like for me, and in true Monday form, the train I took into work was running late. So late, in fact, that I didn’t get to work until 9:30. I start at 8:30. At least my boss is cool with commuter troubles. She goes through it herself.

Also, your hostess was thwarted in my quest for lunchtime coffee, since I didn’t have any this morning. It’s raining pretty hard out there, and I have no umbrella.

And a white shirt.

Which means, Starbucks Mocha Frappucino from CVS. Coffee isn’t supposed to be this thick. Stupid Starbucks. Stupid rain. Stupid Tuesday that’s acting like a Monday.

Dear Hill:

I still have it.

(And for the curious, if you can read it off the picture, the website still exists. Warning: the design alone will make your eyes bleed, not to mention the content…)

I was just trying to reserve the username. I have no intention of cat-vacuuming.

Yes, I now have a twitter account. I tell myself it will, if I use it at all, make posts like “QQ I got wet in the rain” shorter, so I can focus more time on either blogging about important things (go on, laugh), or writing.

Yeah. Sure.

Heeeeeere, kitty kitty…

It is very, very tempting to hop onto ye olde bandwagon and examine my writing process, as Lori and Deb are doing. I’m fascinated by both, partly because I can see similarities and differences between how they plan their writing and how I do.

I’m tempted to say that mine is planned not-at-all, but that’s not true. It’s just something I do so automatically, I suppose, that I’ve never really considered it a process. I’m awful with outlines. I have character spreadsheets all over the place, and snippets of story scrawled onto whatever paper I can find. (There is a stack of legal pads in my study, whose first several pages are all whatever I was working on when it was within reach. I should take a picture.)

There’s an ATM receipt that’s been in my purse for a year - that, much like my old hard drive - made the trip from one purse to another, actually. It has a snippet of conversation from a scene I’d planned on writing for Threnn nearly a year ago, but never got around to. I still like it, though. Four lines of dialogue, a thought, and a closing sentence, and I want to find somewhere to put them.

Though, my WoW writing has always been like that - scene by scene, not even what I’d necessarily call a short story, since what’s happening is so organic. Other people contribute to plotlines, and one simple line of dialogue from another character can make your carefully planned out story take a completely different turn (this is very rarely a Bad Thing, by the way.)

But the process of writing my other stuff, my I Wanna Get This Published Someday stuff, while it shares some similarities, also has more structure in my approach. I’m thinking that a closer examination of what I’m doing might actually make me progress better.

There are things that both of the ladies are doing that I’m curious to try, now, to see if adapting some of their techniques would work for me.

And of course (she says, resigned that yes, she’s going to pick up her dusty ol’ backpack and take a running leap onto that bandwagon as it comes around the bend), the question becomes, which project do I choose to yatter on about?

I’m a bad blogger.

I’ve been shirking my duties to entertain you lot, but for good reason!

First is work-related. There is a rant coming of epic proportions, and I’m trying to make it less angry-sales-rep-rawr and more constructive-advice-to-booksellers. But it’s tough right now since I’m still in the rawr phase. I’ll probably be in it for another month at least, but I’m hoping to get the post up this week.

Second is writing stuff (yay!). I’ve mentioned before that Annalea’s not terribly forthcoming with me. I have added notes and taken them away from her gdoc, trying desperately to figure out how the pieces of her puzzle fit together. She shuffles some around when I’m not looking, hides others in the cabinets, or under the plants, snatches one from my hand just as I see where it belongs and puts another in its place.

She’s mischievous like that.

I spent a good chunk of last week trying to pry a scene out of her, and finally posted it around 1:00 this morning. It was, I think, one of the hardest I’ve written for her in over a year. I know what happens from there on out, but this was a blank space - I knew the conversation had taken place, and that it hadn’t necessarily ended on an ideal note, but I didn’t know exactly what had been said.

It was awkward for her - Anna’s armor is, quite often, nothing more than her pride. Here she was, going to someone above her station, hat in hand, feeling as low as she ever had. It was hard getting it right for her - her words, her thoughts, her reactions. And the person she spoke with really isn’t the villain here, either (though the villain has made his appearance, now, finally), so it was tough to coax that bumbling chat out of him, too, and finding the line between him being an ass and simply coming from a different kind of mindset.

Of course, now that the scene is finished, Anna’s dangling another puzzle piece in front of me. She seems to have peeked over at the puzzle on her sister’s table and found a piece gathering dust. “I want to borrow him,” she’s saying, and Threnn’s too busy staring at something small and shiny and red to do more than shrug.

This hypothetical conversation between Anna and Robert Bell (a minor character who has appeared briefly several times in Threnn’s stories) came to me almost in its entirety as I was walking to get my coffee this morning. It’s a good one. Actually, it’s a very sweet one. I know I could take that puzzle piece from her, and if I turned it over in my hands, I’d have it done in less time than it’s taken to write this post.

But I don’t think it belongs in the story that I’m writing right now. It doesn’t hurt the tale, really, but I can’t say it quite fits, either. If it was a movie, it would be a deleted scene. I think it’s canon for her, because it’s the second time she’s tried co-opting this minor character that I’ve hitherto associated with Threnn, but I’m not so sure it’ll ever actually be written.

We’re going to argue about this, Anna and I, but I think she can see the other pieces wanting to fall into place, too, and this is a digression neither of us desperately need. The backstory is… nearly done. Two more posts/chapters/installments/whatever-you-call-them, maybe three, and then I’ll see about this other scene. If it’s anything as vivid as it is right this second, it’ll end up somewhere.

I have a folder called “Stuff the Author Knows” on my machine at home. It’s mostly for things I’ve cut out of my longer stories - worldbuilding stuff that I don’t want to forget, scenes that don’t fit anywhere now but might later on, characters who don’t quite belong to the story in which they first appeared. I’m starting to think I need to add one to my gdocs, too.

So, yeah. Bad blogger, no biscuit.

I have some. No, really, it was over there just a second ago…

There is a garden in my backyard. The onions and green beans seem to be casualties, and I have a feeling that once upon a time, there might have been some corn, too, only if it ever existed, all evidence of it has been wiped off the face of the planet.

There are, however, the beginnings of peppers (red, green, and jalapeno), and some promising looking tomato plants. And basil. My basil will take over the world. These things are thriving. I am envisioning tomato, basil and mozzarella salad, fresh from the garden later this summer. I’m not quite brave enough to try making my own mozzarella, but there is at least one really good Italian deli between my office and the train station where I can get some.

The pool is also open. The water is at, oh, 72 degrees. Which you’d think would be plenty warm enough. That’s room temperature, right? I stood there on Saturday, up to my waist, my legs going numb, and had to berate myself before I could dive in all the way (”You fucking wimp. Move.“) Rinse and repeat for Sunday. Once you’re in, though, it’s pretty nice. Now if only we can have some nice weekends this summer - my parents and extended family got more good swimming-time out of it last summer than we did. I’d like to not spend so many Saturdays staring forlornly out the window while it pours and thunders this year, thanks.

Writing: rrrgh. Some. Lori has linked to a shiny new tool on her blog, and I’m mulling over the idea of playing with it, too. Problem is, I’m working on three stories at once (”Four!” insists poor Lil, as the demon that’s been chasing her for several months cackles). All told, the three amount to about 11,000 words and none of them are finished. Threnn’s has maybe one more scene until she’s (mostly) caught up to the present. Anna has two stories going at once - from a year of near-silence to suddenly-won’t-shut-up - and they’re kind of coming out in alternating sections.

Lil’s only about 2,000 words into her run, out of… I’m aiming for 6,000 or less. So, if I do stick a counter up here, I suppose it makes more sense to wait until I go back to Lil.

It doesn’t help that one of my ficlets would like to possibly be something longer, either.

Okay. We have far, far too long until BSG’s endgame begins. Nothing new (from what I understand) until 2009. Which means… let the speculation begin!

If you haven’t seen the most recent episode, “Revelations,” DO NOT CLICK THE MORE BUTTON.

Because, darlin’-pretties, there will be many spoilers after you (insert Hybrid-voice here)… Jump!

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I have a BSG post coming, in which those of you who are caught up may frolic and post spoilers and speculation.

But right now, I’m tired, achy, angsty, more than a little mopey, and all-around dun wanna.

Commiserate with me or cheer me up in the comments.