Sweetness.

I didn't finish this last night, so posting it a little late. (Hence words like "tonight" and such.)

I got the bill for my ER visit a couple of weeks ago. Anyone want to take a wild guess what they're billing my insurance company? Anyone? No? $493.72. That's bloody ridiculous. Sure, I'm going to end up paying something like $75, but it pisses me off on behalf of my insurance company. M and I have talked about it several times, the difference between how health care is here and in Sweden. Both of them suck. It's crazy. I won't bother going into it, though, since you either know what I'm talking about or don't care. ;)



Have I mentioned today that I adore my husband beyond any possible description by such trivial things as words?

I told my niece, who's eight, the other night that I married him because he gives good kisses. She looked at me like I was crazy. Of course, at the time, M was drawing cute little pictures of furry animals and then giving them sharp evil teeth and/or pirate paraphernalia to make them look mean, so I could see her point.

That's not actually true. I mean, it's true that he was drawing mean things, but the kisses are not why I married him. It was a nice bonus, of course, but I married him because he's the sweetest boy on earth. Tonight, I was whining about my book and its lack of direction and my inability to write the silly thing. I wasn't being completely serious, just frustrated with the next scene, really, and not sure where to go. (I really should have done more planning beforehand.) When I turned around again and stopped complaining, he sent me a very long ICQ message. And what was in this message? A bunch of copied and pasted comments from LJ entries. He had been saving some of the nice things my lovely friends have said recently about writing-related things into a file and had saved the sending of it for just such an occasion to remind me that I'm not completely hopeless. It was horribly sweet, and it reminded me how much I love him.. which is a nice way to begin a third/seventh anniversary weekend trip. Now if only the weekend would get here.

Words and vacation plans

My poor characters have such stupid conversations when I get pressed for word count, and poor Lane is convinced that I hate her for making her act like such a bitch. This is the second completely worthless conversation they've had (plus one that will need revised for the same problem but is essentially okay) and I can't come up with anything else to come after this so I'm finding it impossible to end the stupid scene and move on. It's very annoying. The words have stopped flowing. Now they're being carved out with a chainsaw, and that isn't exactly the most sophisticated process. I'm forcibly reminding myself that it will be easier to replace those scenes with something worthwhile later. I also seem to be forcibly reminding all of you. Sorry about that.

I just tried to convince M that we should leave for Gatlinburg tomorrow night instead of Saturday morning so we can have three days of writing off instead of just two. Damn him for being clever enough to figure it out. :) We were going to do that to begin with, but we finally decided that it didn't make much sense. It's a four hour drive, and the most straight-forward way of getting there is to go approximately to Lexington and then go south. M works in Lexington, which is one hour from here. He also works tomorrow as usual, so he would have to come home, pick me up, and then we'd have a four hour drive in front of us with no chance of getting there until ten, even if we don't eat dinner. So, not very practical, as we'd be staying the night in a motel room for no good reason. Oh, right, and my car can't leave town because of its wonky transmission, so I can't drive down there and leave from Lexington even if I wanted to. So we're going to get up quite early on Saturday and aim for being there by lunch, which will save us around $60 and a lot of headache.

So, why're we going to Gatlinburg? Sure, it's touristy, but we've already been there three times in three years, so why would we want to go again? It's simple, really. There's a bookstore and a Chinese place we like to frequent. That's also why we don't necessarily need all that much time. :) I wish we could be there on our actual anniversary, though, which is the 18th.

Look at me procrastinate. Didn't I say that I was going to stop doing that today? Eh, well, I also said I was going to write 2,000 words today and look where that's gotten me. :) I'm off to fold clothes, watch Friends and put off writing for another couple of hours. Yay! :)

On writing...

Expressions that you don't expect to hear from an author:

"This book should be an aardvark."
--Magnus Yayer, 11/13/03, when asked about his first novel What It's Like to Have a Tail.