Home again, and back to the grind

Everytime I thank everyone for posting birthday wishes on my Facebook page, that seems to attract another group of well wishers. I'm really consumed with guilt now, as I know all of these people had birthdays in the last twelve months and I didn't post on their walls. I'm not very diligent about logging into Facebook everyday.

We got home a couple of days ago and I've been trying to re-situated. I wrote a ton of verbiage on the trip, then came home, analyzed it, and threw out about 30k words. I know, I know, that's a lot. Yes, it makes writing extremely tedious, but being honest with myself, I need to do all of these rewrites in order to get the quality I want. Well, no, I don't ever write the quality I want, so let me substitute "words that don't make me want to scratch my eyes out... most of the time" for that. I've been playing around with scene setup and I'm reframing every scene so that it's intensive on the showing and light on the telling. Picking which scenes I need is then the next challenge. So... anyway. The good thing is that once I make a breakthrough, I can put 5-10k words into the file in a day.

And I've been working on scrapbooking to give myself a mental break. I'm making my son's baby book look like a medieval manuscript and doing a friend's wedding album. For the latter project I'm still hunting down pictures (Ryan, Katie, if you guys have more pictures send me a Picasa link!) They had a beautiful wedding, and I'm trying to do it justice. I have only a couple hundred pictures - which may sound like a lot, but it isn't if you consider how many are duplicates, people taking multiple shots of the same pose.

I've also decided to branch out a little bit and study jewelry making. After Googling up a storm, I've decided to try chain maille because 1) it seems like a very fantasy dork medium and 2) it reminds me of crocheting, but doesn't look like it takes as long. I have a very hard time finishing my knitting and crocheting projects because I get bored with them. They take soooo long, so rather than being a creative outlet, they're their own kind of torment. The only projects I can finish are baby blankets for friends, because those have a deadline. We'll see if making little metal chains is more satisfying.

And by "what I need", I of course mean, "yet another distraction from housework". I need to feel I've accomplished something at the end of the day, and vacuuming and laundry don't really do it for me. People keep undoing all that hard work! (Well, okay, not hard work in my case. I lament about this at a theoretical level.)