New month

Wow, the weekend slipped right past me. It was so busy I'm having a hard time getting going today.

Writing: I put some time into reworking the plot for Hope. As usual, a random comment at the conference stuck with me. Randy Ingermanson said that every character thinks he's the hero of the book, even the antagonist. It made me realize how underutilized Charlotte is, so she won't be getting married as soon as she thought. I also found a solution for a difficulty I'd been having with meshing character arcs to create conflict. It dawned on me one night when I couldn't sleep (that makes no sense) that I could use document protectors and dry-erase markers to do individual character arcs, and then stack them together to see where in the story each thing has to fall. It seems to be working, although of course it's not quite as simple as it sounds.

Clutter: Going backwards on this one. I brought home a bag of books from the conference, of course, plus notes and other assorted crap. Then we went to the Highland Games and shopped. Now I have lots of fun stuff I have to find homes for. However, my trip to Michigan motivated me to get serious about cutting clutter in my house. I went to my dad's. I love him like crazy, but he's an unsupervised pack rat. His dining room looked like a flea market, and that was the organized part. It's not quite as bad as an episode of Hoarders, but left to his own devices, it could be. Our friend, Linda, is staying with him this month while he recovers from surgery, so she's working on cutting down his clutter. Maybe it will be manageable by the time she goes home.

Health: I've lost the weight I gained in my travels, and I think I'm going to work off a couple more pounds before I go on maintenance. I'm on a roll so I figure I might as well. Have I mentioned The Gracious Pantry here yet? It's a clean eating website and all the recipes I've tried from it are great. When I first found it I spend hours printing recipes, so what to make for dinner is less of an issue than it used to be.

Misc: Becoming a bard's apprentice has at least doubled my research, so organization is becoming more important. The "To Do, Doing, Done" cork board has been dusted off and new items added, and I'm back to pen and paper for the daily To Do list. My office needs a good clean, too. Why is it, when I have my list done and ready to go, all I want to do it curl up in bed and read all day?