I won’t make my deadline. (The deadline finish the WiP’s rewrite by January 1st.) I’ve known this for a while now and I’ve made my peace with it. The husband, too. He chuckled and said, “It was fictitious. You know you’re on a deadline, but I’m trying to remind you that the deadline isn’t ‘in the future’, it’s now.” It’s true. The fire under the butt has been lit for some time and it’s also true that I’ve made some serious progress so far this month. (That, and I devoured First Lord’s Fury by Jim Butcher over a 2 day span last week. Oh, the Codex Alera, how I love it so.) Considering November was swallowed by the Black Hole of NaNoWriMo, I am pleased that I was able to hop back into this (very different!) story and get it in snapping shape. The NaNo draft helped me amp up this one, I think, by comparison. They’re such different stories and getting back into my narrator’s head this month after being third person all over the place last month helped reassert the importance of voice, diction, and character in first person.

This month the husband (why am I calling him that now? Has he outgrown ‘the boy’?) read the entire draft in its new and happily rewritten form and he made a whole bunch of suggestions. (The first being, once he got up as far as it’s written, the comment, “Why isn’t it DONE yet?! GAHHHH!” Oh, a familiar sentiment from the Alpha Readers. [I shall call you that, ladies!]) He’s easily caught up on logical errors and always wants everything to be “Epic!” and so if a supposed action sequence dribbles on the page, he’ll call me on it. “I expected EPIC, Erin, EPIC!” Of course, I am not writing Epic Fantasy (let’s remember that is its own genre) and he knows that, but his sentiment is rather universal. Dribbling scenes are no fun for anyone.

In non-writing news, the holidays have been fun. We did Hanukkah (all eight nights of candles and presents!) and Christmas, and of course the husband’s birthday fell between the two so it was more or less non stop presents and such. We got him a PlayStation 3 (us, really) for the birthday, as well as a fun assortment of toys related to it (oh, BluRay!). I also made him a scrapbook, my first foray into the world of scrapbooking. (I cheated; I used a kit and a bunch of pre-made stickers. Is that cheating? I know people get intense about scrapbooks.) I thematically designed it around our “love” (cough, or relationship), starting with hilarious photos from 2004, through our backpacking venture in 2007, leading to the wedding and honeymoon. It was one of those sugary-cutesy things I’m only really inclined to do every few years, though the look on Bryan’s face was absolutely worth it. (If cutesy-artsy things didn’t take me forever to do — perfectionism! — I’d do them more often. The girlie 12 year old part of me enjoys it immensely. [My inner 12 year old is always the loudest of the inner children. My inner 8 year old wanted a Lego kit for Christmas -- either a Star Wars one or a castle/knights one -- and I think she's still upset about not getting one again.])

Hm. I keep making parenthetical observations in parentheses. Are there parenthetical commentary abusers anonymous meetings? Or messageboards?

Oh. Day after Christmas, we found FernGully at Target for $5. After seeing Avatar the weekend before Christmas (which was AMAZING!!!!), I realized I really needed to own a DVD version of that movie. (My 8 year old inner self was reasonably appeased by this purchase.) I sat and watched it that night with rapt attention. I’m not ashamed at all. I was Crysta for Halloween one year and had a three-year (minimum!) obsession with fairies. These are the things that (all added together) led me to writing fantasy in the first place. Kind of fascinates me, in a way, backtracking through my years of obsessions and how they’ve all influenced me. (Lock me up before I start self-psychoanalyzing all of that.)

The Christmas tree is still alive. (Fraser fir is the way to go, folks!) We’re going to take its lights and ornaments off after New Year’s and cart it to our local park where it will be recycled into mulch for the spring. (Yay recycling!) The day after Christmas I started pulling out all the decor boxes, to pack it all up, and the husband (this is his first Christmas tree) refused to let me. “Not yet!” Oh, Christmas is magic, isn’t it?