My message board appears to be offline today. I’m not quite sure what the issue is. If it doesn’t resolve itself by tomorrow, I will explore further. I have been planning to replace this old, clunky Perl board with a newer, spiffier PHP board, and will probably get around to that. Sooner than later if this problem persists. I’ve had a number of issues with it over the years, and they’re hard to diagnose because of the nature of Perl/CGI. Stay tooned. YaBB also seems to be a spam magnet.
I submitted my first new short story in a while this morning. I’ve been recirculating the old ones that still haven’t found a home lately, but this is the first new fiction I’ve finished lately. It wasn’t an easy one to write, for some reason. It took at least three weeks to finish the first draft, which came in at about 6400 words. I spent all weekend whittling and honing it into shape. The final version was about 5300 words. Much tighter and far more logical and fluid than the first draft, and I was quite happy with it when I “finished.” I put that in quotes because I don’t think a story is ever really finished. I just get to the point where I’m either tired of revising it or it needs to get out the door to meet a deadline. I made at least six full editing passes at it this weekend. Two in hardcopy and the others online. Each time, I thought I’d gotten it more or less the way I wanted, but I always have to read it one more time because I have a tendency to accidentally delete too many words in some places or leave behind strays in others, and I’d always find new ways of wording things or restructure paragraphs on each read-through. I hope the editor likes it, but I’m tempting fate by leaving it this close to the deadline to submit. Not sure what I’m going to tackle next. I have that editing job sitting on my desk nagging at me, but I have a couple of other things I’d like to write, too, and there are only so many hours in a day…
We watched the first three episodes of the sixth season of The Sopranos last night. Interesting. Tony’s “dreams” while he was in a coma should make for some interesting therapy material, assuming he recovers and doesn’t spend the next 18 episodes in the hospital. The voice on the phone that was supposed to be his wife didn’t sound like Carmella, and the kids were much younger than Meadow and AJ. After his dream Alzheimer’s diagnosis, he was starting to wonder if maybe he really was this person whose wallet and briefcase he somehow acquired. Strange.
