Small update

Didn't do much this weekend. Spent a lot of time with Kouryou-chan playing board games, although we did go out minature golfing. Wrote only about a thousand words, which is better than usual. I usually don't write at all on the weekends. Went out to the Bi-and-Bi social and was pleasantly surprised by three new people showing up. The third episode of Drawn Together was weak. Got nothing done on the technological front. Played way too much Doom 3. Did absolutely no cooking this weekend: we had so many leftovers they made up the bulk of our dinners, but we still ate great: homemade chili is better after a few days in the 'fridge, and the pasta & cheese was still delicious, as was the pumpkin curry stew and the tortellini. Omaha and I apparently cooked too much earlier this week.

My current story has, once again, exploded, and I'm feeling a bit like how Robert Jordan has been described: every character gets elevated to being the author of his or her own story. Now that the story's reached 40,000 words the trouble begins: a group of characters, many of them military, from a repressed society find themselves on a starship filled with apparent libertines, and two of them for different reasons take a bite of that apple. I can write that smut with a splash, but I'm still grappling with the ripples: what do their commanding officers do with this sudden, apparently legal but clearly unacceptable breach of decorum?

I heard an interview with writer Jimmy McGovern, who wrote soap opera for the BBC about a decade ago and now has a critically acclaimed drama series on BBC America called "The Street." "Soap opera writers are constantly complaining that they haven't got enough story. Imagine trying to write a half-hour story about somebody in a house complaining about making the tea too often. Soap opera writers learn to mine a story for all its worth. Am I exploring this enough? Am I being fair to this character?" I worry right now that I'm exploring this too much, that worrying too much about how Cmdr. San Txema and Ambassador Tempany will react to the news that wild interspecies orgies have broken out in Civilian Conference Room #4 will get in the way of the gonzo, and it's gonzo for which I'm aiming. (Can I really write "gonzo" when I'm almost physically incapable of ending a sentence with a preposition?)