I haven’t written anything in a long time. A lot has happened and nothing has happened.

I took down my posts about Gemma because I decided to adopt another dog. I didn’t want to talk about it on potential adoption applications and I didn’t want to fuck up my chances of being approved either. We don’t have a fenced yard and some rescues are pretty strict about that stuff. So instead, we bought a dogrun.

Michael set it up the day after we adopted Peanut, our new puppy. I didn’t mean to adopt a puppy, but she is really young and is not potty trained, or anything. She can’t even walk on the leash yet. I also made the decision to get another dog while I was staying at a mental health facility some weeks back, which probably wasn’t wise. I really need the time to rest right now, but I was so incredibly depressed and thought I couldn’t live without a dog in my life. I mean, I can’t. She is great to take naps with, but I don’t have the energy to train her. I will though. I just need some time.

The whole NaNoWriMo thing has taken a backseat. Kinda. I keep meaning to work on it in the early morning hours, but I don’t have time now with a puppy in the house. I hardly have time to make a cup of coffee and go to the bathroom. She cries all the time–it’s like having an infant in the house. I already had about 25K words written and keep thinking I could catch up and have a book, at least before the end of the year. I’ve also made about 100 different decisions back and forth about how fictionalized it was going to be.

It will definitely be a work of fiction. No doubt. But I’d written detailed character backgrounds about all of the main character’s family members while I was waiting to start writing the actual book so that I’d be working within the NaNo “rules,” and now I think that it was a colossal waste of time, mostly because I’m writing in first person and the situations are mostly real. I mean, some are completely made up, or bits and pieces of people I knew. I guess all writers do that. But not every writer makes such detailed preparations and I don’t usually do such things. In all my short stories I have a good idea of everyone I’m writing about, fiction or otherwise. It’s just not a process I normally use and I was only doing it to buy time as to not actually start writing until November 1st. Stupid.

I’ll admit, I’ve been spending more time cleaning up short stories to submit around and possibly get ready to possibly add them to a book of short stories, which I could use as my NaNo project if I wanted to. Possibly. I’ll still keep working on Queer as Mud, but maybe my heart is really in the short stories for now, even though no one wants to publish them in their literary publications. I keep rewriting them because of this. Every time they’re rejected, I think they’re not very good and I try to make them better, but maybe it’s no use. I only have seven, maybe eight anyhow: about 20K words. That’s just not enough for a whole book, even if I made some illustrations. I’d need twice that before I’d feel justified in putting a book together.

So I think that’s it for now.