I have:

1) Become relatively adept at using Minnow's tiny keyboard, to the point that when I tried to check my mail on Dann's laptop, my fingers couldn't adequately reach to all the keys the first time I typed my password. I am slightly concerned about going home to the desktop tomorrow, but I guess if I'm back to laptop usage as my main writing computer, that's no real hardship--I'm more likely to get out to the coffeeshop some weekends, this way.

Mostly, I'd just like to be fluent with both keyboards, all the time. I have this vision that someday I'll be able to come home with my Great Ideas, and when I start dinner, I'll sit down at the dining room table in between frying things. I'll let you know how that goes.

2) Gone for a run. I did 5 of 7 60-second jogs/90 second walks in the Couch to 5K running plan. Naturally, I'd like to have done 7 of 7, but I decided that I'd give myself a chance to get up to speed before cracking any whips. The goal is to get two more in of at least 5/7 in the next week. Weds or Thurs, and Sat or Sun. We shall see. The wind was just perfect off the lake for the first/last chunks of my run, drying all my sweat before it appeared. I didn't start sweating noticeably until I went inside. Running would be a hell of a lot easier if it was always like this.

3) Added 2000 words of necessary material to my novel. Connective tissue, explanatory tissue, character development, tension-building stuff. Booyah.

I know that at least half of what has made this novel work is that I didn't shy away from writing longer works for a while, as unsaleable as they are. This novel, frex, developed out of a 12k word story. At the same time, I know that simply finishing loads of short stories helped me with the comprehension of overall story structure. And I'm sure that all my false starts to the six other novels I've written helped me, too, in spite of the fact that they were not completed. But. The single biggest thing that contributed to finishing this novel was the threat of library school that I held over my head. I could be content being a librarian. But I wouldn't be content like I am right now--even now, book half-rewritten, unpublished...

It's the difference between marrying a good guy and the right guy for you, I suspect.

4) Did a jack tonne of more research for this book. Every time I think I'm getting somewhere, I scratch something and uncover a billion more things I didn't know or think to know about 1489 Romania. Like, it didn't really hit me until recently that jannissaries were relevant to this setting. Ah, DUH. So, last night, read up on devshirme and figured out that, no, that doesn't play a huge role in the book, but it's a factor--in the culture, and in at least one character's background.

5) Stuck to Phase 1 of the South Beach Rewrite Your Eating Life Plan. Being at the lake and NOT eating cheetos, ice cream, cookies and red licorice at whim? BLASPHEMY. But I did it. Just eating like a normal person at the lake is hard--actually, maybe harder, in some ways, because you don't have the diet to fall back on. But we're about an hour from leaving, and I haven't even opened the bag of Twizzlers sitting on the counter. The hardest part was not getting any potato at dinner, and not getting chips with lunch. But I lived to tell about it. That would make tomorrow one week in on my low-glycemic index carbs and no refined anything effort, and I could already tell by Friday that some of my pants were fitting looser. Lunch today was Brussels sprouts and buffalo burger, which I rather enjoyed. About three days ago, I thought I might kill for a piece of fruit. Today--eh. We'll see what I think at the end of the week. Interestingly, the dairy at this phase has not set off my lactose intolerance...