Word count: 78323 | Since last entry: 1810

Being retired means that I can get kind of disconnected from the calendar. We often don’t know what day of the week it is, and (you may find this hard to believe) we actually haven’t really felt the pressure of Christmas approaching. Some years it’s kind of snuck up on us, but this year it really pounced. As of this morning I had purchased exactly three presents, and we have no tree nor lights.

The good news is, I’m retired. So we drove downtown and did our shopping, and now I’m done with that. The crowds weren’t too bad, even this close to Christmas, given that we were shopping on a weekday. We will wrap the presents tonight, and they’ll go in the mail tomorrow. Also tomorrow, the electrician is coming to install an electrical outlet on the front of the house, so we can put up lights (as we haven’t been able to do since we replaced our porch light with a compact fluorescent fixture that doesn’t support those screw-in plug adapter thingies we used to use). We’ll get a tree soon.

Meanwhile, I’ve had a number of interesting writing and other workshop opportunities appear for next year. They’re all cool, but even for me there’s only so much time and money, so I’m going to have to make some hard choices. One unpleasant surprise: the workshop I want to take this novel to has a deadline at the beginning of March, not April as I’d thought. So I have to double my productivity if I’m going to get the damn thing done in time. A thousand words a day should do it.

So I wrote a thousand words today. It’s getting easier now that the plot is really starting to accelerate, but we’ll see how long I can keep this up.