Can’t trust that day

Sales meetings at work today, mostly for acquiring editors and the marketing team, but at least I got a free lunch out of it.

Of course, they’ll tell you there’s no such thing as a free lunch. And maybe I paid for it with my evening commute, which was pretty dreadful, thanks to the Long Island Railroad’s complete inability to deal with the weather. I’m still not entirely sure what happened — I’ve heard hail storm, I’ve heard lightening strike — and I’m still amazed that none of the bad weather made it to Manhattan.

Of course, I very nearly didn’t get out of Manhattan. I rushed to make a 4:54 train, only to discover it had been canceled, along with many other trains. I finally squeezed aboard the today-only 5:22 and made decent enough home, home a little over an hour later. Except that’s an hour of standing in very tight corner on a train that only proceeded to pick up new passengers as we went along. There was one woman, who seemed perfectly nice, but whose hair kept brushing into me. And there was the gentleman who suddenly decided to share with us his love of Creedence Clearwater Revival (or crappy headphones). Basically, we were packed like sardines for an hour…if sardines were packed standing up and fully conscious.

I was very happy to get off the train.

Oh, and I should note: I did not finish writing my short story over the weekend. It was due today, but I hit a brick wall around 10 o’clock last night, after which my brain just stopped working properly. I wasn’t entirely pleased with everything I’d written leading right up to that, and it felt like the story was going to need at least another full scene, one that was going to take me more than a couple of hours (even with a working brain) to write. I like the story enough that I want to put the effort into it, not rush it just to meet the deadline.

But, you say, isn’t that exactly what you’re going to be doing with the 3-Day Novel Competition? Well, yes, in a way. But there, that’s part of the experience, the mad rush to finish, to just keep writing. I’m almost certainly going to have plenty of terrible writing in whatever I manage to come up with over the course of those three days, lots of work that will need lots of editing, but I’ll have time for editing after. (Well, unless it’s so good that it wins the competition.) With this story, I only had that crazy rush to finish because I didn’t know about the deadline earlier.

This was good practice for that, and the 3-day competition is a good (if crazy) writing exercise, but not every story benefits by being written that way.