meh.

I feel like I'm getting sick again. Sore throat, fatigue, stuffy head, blahdablahdablahda. Yay for tea and cough drops!

So I gave the first two [polished] chapters of my NaNoNovel (Hereby called by its working title: Alchemist's Child) to a friend to critique. Said friend is also a fantasy writer and has ready many books on the subject (and even has a signed letter from Terry Brooks, author of the Shannara series (which I have not gotten around to reading, yet).

Friend apologized for taking so long, and admitted that he'd sit down to critique and get so involved in the story he'd forget! He finally gave up all hopes of redpenning until he'd read them, and then would go back and write. Yay for me, I can be engaging! :-D

So I've been participating (loosely) in the National Novel Publishing Year. February was for researching agents and publishing houses. I've found two good legit sites (Preditors and Editors and AgentQuery). On AQ I even found an agent who specializes in the sort of novel I wrote! :-D

March is National Novel Editing Month, where the goal is to put in 50 hours of editing. We'll see how it goes, as it's been a busy time for me IRL and I only really get pockets of time to do stuff. I've been steadily (if not slowly) editing the whole thing since January, however, and it's shaping up into a nice little story. My only fear is that it's too little. I think I know where I can expand on, and hopefully I can do that in March, and certainly Friend's critiques will aid in that. On a whole, I'm feeling very happy and confident about my little adventure.

On other creative fronts, I've been toiling away periodically on my FreeForm knitting project. It's turned out to be dense and slow going, but a little bit here and a little bit there and I'll have a little poncho :-) I might get one more skein of the Noro, but I want to see how long my first lasts me. I *may* not need another, and don't want to jump the gun. It's a varigated, and it's broken up by other yarns, so it's not exceedingly important that it be from the same dye lot, fortunately.

I don't think my cello wanted to be practiced today. I started out and everything was in tune except the C string, which had fallen, so I had to tune that, then tune the others that had gotten out of whack, and then halfway through my practice session the other three strings decided to whack out too and fall down the depths of hte known scale. Aragorn; 2, Caitlin: 2. We are tied.

I haven't done much drawing outside of my D&D gaming group, although I am trying to get a better feel for people, starting with my Gnome Druid 'Zikky', which is truly a challenge as Zikky is a transvestite and right now none of the other characters (or players, for that matter) know that "She" is really a "He". Thank the gods for non-gender specific Gnomish names! :-D

Well, my tea is at its end, and I must refill it before my throat erupts in an explosion liken to that of Mount Toba.

~Gyda