Energy Absorb Skill!

It's possible I've gone off the deep end with the wuxia. My boys are starting to think I'm nuts, but there's just something about watching a ton of these movies that makes you want to not only do kung fu, but shout out your moves when you do them. "Swinging sword!" "Shadowless kick!"

I think if I could say them in Chinese it'd be cooler, eh?

Novel research is so much fun (especially when you really bend the definition of "research").

Well, the real point of this post was to make a personal goal public. I intend to finish the WIP by June 30. Since I started last January, that would be 18 months from start to finish, much shorter than the 5 years the previous novel took to write (although in my defense, infants are horrible distractions with no sense of boundaries or personal time). I think it's doable because summer in general gives me more time to write, as the boys go to the park every night and stay until it's completely dark, and also because I'll have a three week chunk of no homeschooling, as it will be the boys' between grades break. The further along we go on this homeschooling adventure the less grades mean anything; the only thing that marks fourth grade different from third is the math book, everything else just continues along at its own pace. Still, since we school year-round (three weeks on and one week off every month - we're not nuts!), the three week vacation in May is always nice, especially since the two weeks we take off in December are usually desperately needed for cranky, too-much-overtime-at-work Mom.

Note for Blogspot readers: If you notice that the Zokutou word meter in the corner of the blog isn't moving, that doesn't mean I'm not writing like a madwoman. It just means I haven't copy-typed out of my notebooks. Having spent last week's writing time copy-typing short stories and a bit of the novel out of my notebooks (did you notice it bump up a little? it did!), all I can say is that's a lot like work! I suppose I shouldn't wait so long and then have to do it all at once (or maybe get a program that can read my handwriting off scanned notebook pages - that would be cool).

At any rate, wish me luck!