A Friday roundup.

I’ve got nothing big to blog about today, so I’m just going to quickly share a few things that have been going on in my life and writing lately:

• Finally got the car back today! When I took it in for collision repair on Tuesday morning, I was hoping I’d be able to pick it up Wednesday evening, but what with the somewhat wet weather they didn’t get the paint dry until this morning. It’s so pretty though! And it was interesting to go through a few days without having access to the car–I’ve been relying on it more and more lately, especially being able to use it when I have appointments or the weather is bad. Instead, I had to struggle with public transit through one day with messy weather, and one day with a dental filling in the afternoon, sigh.
• I got my last summer workshop application sent in: Synopsis and sample pages of “The Gnomes are Missing” emailed to Kij Johnson for the CSSF Novel writer’s program. I’m looking forward to hearing back from all my workshop opportunities, and big thanks to Rinelle and Elizabeth Twist for critiquing my synopsis several times and making it much better!
• The final revision pass of “Won’t somebody think of the children?” is finally done; one day late, compared to my target, but there was a lot to do, especially taming my crazy punctuation. I have a tendency to use a ‘space hyphen space’ combination in my writing for a brief pause, and in fact I used it twice by this point in the post, but went back and changed them. Because that is a combination that is wrong according to every style authority I can find, I’m putting myself on a zero tolerance program for it in my revisions; I can use proper M-dashes, I can use colons or semicolons or commas or periods or ellipses, but no hyphens as pauses. So I started off NaNoEdMo this evening by fixing a few hundred hyphens-as-pauses from ‘Children.’ I’ll be sending off the completed draft to two critters.org critiquers in the morning.
• I’m really pleased with my progress in my ‘February month of drawing.’ I still have a few sketches to share with you, more negative space stuff, (a basketball pose and a chair from life,) but I haven’t taken the workbook in to work to scan them yet, so hopefully that’ll be Monday evening.
• Didn’t do so well with ‘How to Think Sideways’ – I got started on lesson 1, but didn’t have time to finish it, and it might be a while before I get back to it, what with NaNoEdMo and Camp Nanowrimo and what-have you.
• I may be loaning the Kindle to my mom, because she’s been wondering about getting an E-reader of her own. It’ll be odd not having it around for a week or so, but I’m happy to help. 🙂
• And it’s only a week until the Trek TNG reunion Comicon in Toronto! I’m not hugely excited for this one, because money’s tight and I’m a bit tired of the high prices, but I’ll be heading in for Saturday, checking out a few Q&As, and looking for Buffy season 9 graphic novels.

So – what’s up with you lately? How’ve ya been?

Lotsa car stuff going on.

So let’s see, where do I start? First off, it’s over a year that I’ve been a G2 licensed driver – I passed my road test on Feb 21st last year! 🙂

In the ‘not good news’ category, I got my car insurance renewal papers already, and they came with a pretty hefty premium increase. Sigh. (Guess that’s what I get for getting in a fender bender after having my car for a few weeks.)

I’ve booked my first try at the G road test, for March 12th. I’m feeling pretty confident, should probably make some time to drill myself on the basics between now and then. Maybe if I pass the G before my insurance renews, I can use that as leverage to get a break on the premium.

And I’ve booked the car into a collision repair shop to get the little dings in the bumper taken care of before the test. 😉

This kinda stuff isn’t my favorite part of being a car owner, it adds up into stress. But if you take it a bit at a time, it’s not that bad.