The practicality of my writing life...

I have a small secret: I wasn't at work at all last week. I took the week off because I had hoped to do NaNaWriMo this year, write something interesting, and put it together in a way that would eventually lead to print. My ideal situation was simple: I'd go to the local cafe' at 8:00 and write until 1:00. Five hours, five days: a total of 25 hours of "just writing" time, with no internet access and no distractions. Giving my past history, I should have been able to hit at least 30,000 words in that time.

It didn't work out that way. Kouryou-chan had a dental appointment, Yamaraashi-chan missed the bus one morning, Omaha caught the flu bug, then Kouryou-chan got it. Crisis piled on top of crisis. Instead of 25 hours, I managed 9.

I still managed to put out 14,068 words in that nine-hour period. But damn, it's been one long frustrating exercise in learning just how little support my family really has to get anything done. It explains the insanely early shift I operate at the office to make sure I do enough before I have to run out and drive the children to their various appoinments (Omaha can't drive because of her epilepsy; how do you explain to your boss that the healthy, robust, and beautiful woman you went out to lunch with yesterday is physically handicapped in ways people trapped in wheelchairs aren't?).

Omaha and I talk once in a while about my going semi-pro with my writing, creating marketable materials and so on for my stuff, and eventually branching out of the erotica niche into more ordinary science fiction and fantasy. I'd like to keep my hand in the erotica, at least on the web and in POD (now that I've found Lulu). But to do this, I would need to write 1000 words a day, minimum, and maybe hit 2000 words a day, when working on a novel. Experience has taught me that, between the day job and my responsibilities as a parent, that may well be impossible.

Well, bleah.

Glee!

These mean nothing to you (but they might make sense to fallenpegasus):

foo foo&bar foo&baz&21342&$@# foo=zoom&bar&bob=ted=carol=alice foo&$= foo&%66%64%65 foo&%66%64%65=zoom %66%64%65=zoom& foo&

foo bar&foo %24%40%23&21342&baz&foo bar&bob=ted%3Dcarol%3Dalice&foo=zoom %24=&foo fde&foo fde=zoom&foo &%20foo&fde=zoom

I got the QUERY_INFO string sort and normalize function to work! Whoohoo! Now, on to the rest of the signature!

(Note the fourth example: the input fragment is 'bob=ted=carol=alice', but the equal symbol is a URI reserved character, a CGI argument, and an unreserved initial symbol separating keys from values in CGI arguments and is privileged in the standard; I made the decision to normalize the very first unescaped, but to escape every instance thereafter. I suspect this will not please some people, but it is the best interpretation I can come up with inside the mashup between the specification and RFC 3986).

(Note also the last example with the preceeding '&'; this happens when an empty argument is passed in, i.e. a QUERY_INFO contains '&&'; the empty string bubbles up to the top of the sort list according to asciibetical sorting.)