this one has Elves

You people think I ramble on the internet. But you don't know anything. Try opening up a blank Word document in front of me someday.

Just returned from Ze Salon, as I like to call it in a faux French accent, and am feeling both utterly dejected and oddly upbeat about my magnum opus. Dejected because EVERYBODY IN THE WORLD is a better writer than me, and upbeat because I have come away from the writing group with some helpful notes and a rudimentary plan for overhauling the piece which I will begin doing promptly tomorrow. Unless I wake up and shove it into a drawer instead.  Stop me from doing this! Must. Struggle. Against. Braaiinn...

When I was eleven or twelve or thirteen, writing wasn't a chore. It was impossibly awesome, and I did it without fail every single night, propped up on pillows until all hours (10:00 or possibly even 10:30) (!!), completely filling each of probably twenty or so spiral-bound notebooks still stacked in boxes somewhere in my parents' basement mainly with stories about handsome Tolkien-style Elves and young girls taming wild horses and non-Elven pre-teens who were...sad. About things. As pre-teens so often are. (Probably because their lives are so lacking in handsome Elvish men and/or wild horses.) And it was SO FUN.

Now the prospect of sorting this damn story out borders on terrifying. Rather than propping myself on pillows and doing a little light editing tonight, I'm going to have an ounce of Fernet-Branca (yes! I have discovered the wonders of the world of digestifs! We'll talk later!) and then some Soothing Caramel Bedtime tea and then I may watch an episode of my new favorite British murder-mystery show and then I'll go to bed.

And after going to bed, I plan to lie awake for six hours mentally editing my story and worrying that I ramble too much.