Sent the revised Raiju out to peer review. It's a little bigger than when I first put it out, and I like it a lot better now. All I have to do is sit back and nibble fingernails until the comments come back. In the meantime I'll start on the next bit with Raiu so that it can become better. One of my terrible habits is the automatic compression of ideas. I can write a sentence, that in my thoughts carries the impact of hundreds of words, and I have to keep remembering that not all readers will fill in those gaps. In truth very few of the readers would intuitively see the unwritten parts the way that I had them in my head. I'm trying to go back and fill in those holes so that my stories actually look the way my characters told it looked.

Closed out another chapter in Ion:417 Raiju. That makes ten chapters looking much better than they did before. I figure that there's another twelve to fifteen thousand words to wade through before I find some people willing to give it an honest preview. Once that's done it will be my first book that I'll hire an editor for. At this rate that means about a week. Now I've made a few changes that are going to need to be carried through Raiu, Katana, and Otako

Taking the train to work about half of the days. The boss let me shift the schedule so that I could catch it home as well. Good news: it saves me a few hundred bucks a month. Bad news: adds an hour and a half to commute time because connection routes miss by 3 minutes. I had been waiting two hours extra on those days to drive with someone and share cost. His schedule was 2 hours later than mine. So, now I spend the extra time typing on the train instead of typing on a make-shift desk near the work floor. A couple hundred bucks a month will be nice though.

Thanksgiving was, well... the usual. You know, go off to relative's house that you never see except on certain holidays, sit off to the side as some of them cheer for their favorite sports team, acting as though they had a personal hand in it when the score is favorable, and screaming at the idiots when they blunder. The most interesting thing to do is to play cards with the three year old because you weren't able to bring your laptop. I did manage to make progress on the re-write though. Scrivner has been a great help in keeping the sections notated so that I can go back to find what I need to change.

My NaNoWriMo novel is done! And I hate it. I'll keep it so that I can validate at the end of the month, but afterwards it goes into the future project pile as a re-write. Eventually I'll give it a second chance. If I still hate it, then it will meet the delete key.In the meantime, I've gone back to Ion, and doing a complete re-write/edit. Ion is a good story, and the start of a series that will go on for some time. It's just one of those stories that I went back and said YUCK! Did I really write this badly? I've already completed the first chapter on Ion 417: Raiju, and midway through chapter two. It will definitely be headed to an editor by the end of the year.

Second NaNoWriMo write in went well. It was quieter, so more words got dumped into the stories, but we still had a good time. Note to self: BRING NOTEPAD NEXT TIME. In the rush to get everything ready for the write in I left my power cord sitting on the bed. I got in an hour and a half on my NaNo story before it died with barely enough warning for me to save my progress. I then sat there wishing for the notepad sitting on my desk as frolicking plot bunnies danced around telling me all sort of ideas.
An hour of that and I got my antique laptop back from the borrower, and so I could work on getting other stories edited. My new stuff is too new for the antique to understand, so I rely on the simple versions that I kept on memory sticks.

I know that I was going to stay on task with my own novels, and edit them to death (read as make them so that people liked reading them), but with NaNoWriMo going on I had to start a whole new project. That was just what I didn't need. Now I have even more characters talking in my head. To make it even worse some of the people at work discovered Nano, and so they have been tossing ideas at me. I'm running out of polite ways to tell them I make my own stories. It takes ten times as much effort to try and think in someone else's story and make it work for me. It's one thing to edit a story for a friend and make it work for them, but to make a story mine from some idea tossed at me just doesn't work the same. The next time it happens they will probably be dodging pencils and post-it pads as I tell them to write it themselves.