One of the odd things about being self-employed is that frequently I'll raise my gluey eyeballs from the text I'm editing or the article I'm writing with a frisson of panic--"What day is this??" I will cry to the silence of my office. But since my eyes are generally past the point of focus I cannot simply flip open my calendar, no, I must shout, down the stairs and across the house to my husband, or far worse, send someone an email in order to discover the day. Not that there is much point to discovering said day except to prove to myself that I haven't lost total touch with reality.

This chaos of daylessness is made only worse by the fact that I'm working on a novel in which five chapters can unravel in the course of a character's twenty-four hour span.

I've learned a lot about my habits the past couple weeks of novel writing. I have lots of steam on Monday and maybe even into wednesday, but by the time thursday morning rolls around my characters are as glib and one-dimensional as a Bud Lite commercial. They're insulting each other in cliches and falling for bad lines and traipsing about wastelands that make Waiting for Godot look positively cluttered, due to my inability to describe a single thing. It isn't pretty.

And so you have to find ways to stay excited about this world and its crazy inhabitants that you've created. You have to convince yourself there's a reason for it, one that will have editors drooling to purchase it--(yes, purchase damn it, I'm using the big, complicated word where the little one would do: buy.)

At any rate, to convince myself there was some purpose behind my novel, I decided that, since no one is clamoring to interview me about anything, I would interview myself. After all, I know what questions to ask. And I know how to make me sound...well, if not smart...oh I'll quit while I've not yet made an ass of myself. Anyways, the gracious Sue Hendersen will be running that conversation on her blog on Thursday--which, I think, is the day that comes after that other day, which might be tomorrow, but you really shouldn't take my word for it.

JPR