May is never a good month.

Yesterday morning (Thursday), my Niece came home from work to find her dog being attacked by the pit bull from next door.  My Niece's dog was chained with a heavy logging chain while the other dog had the advantage.  Details are a bit sketchy, but the police weren't called until my Niece got there.

Her dog lived through the initial attack, though severely injured.  Despite heroic efforts by the vet, the dog passed away this morning.  The neighbor blames the chained up dog for being "aggressive".  Seriously.

On tomorrow (Saturday), it will mark six years since my Brother passed away at the age of 40.  I plan to mark the occasion as I usually do.

On the fifteenth, it will mark five years since my Mother passed away.

Yeah, this month sucks.

- Jim

The first rewrite is complete.  Yeah, that's not as big a thing as it could have been.  It was transferring a paper copy back to my computer.  Yeah, I could have saved time and cut and pasted the digital file I recovered and then fixed the formatting, but retyping it forced me to reacquaint myself with all of the material.  Not that it was entirely a good thing though. 

I hate it.

No.  I don't really.  I'm just sick of it at the moment.  Spend enough time on something and you get tired of it real fast, especially when it seems you're not making much headway.  I'm sure I was making progress, but there are further changes and fixes that need to be made. 

But, the first rewrite is complete. 

I'm taking the night off and then I'll start back to work on it tomorrow.

- Jim

Nearly sixteen years ago, I finished a short story for an online thing that I was into.  It was entirely my own creation and it was one of the many steps I took in deciding I wanted to write one day.  It was a um... unique story, and a genre that I thought dead.  Silly me.

I found a publishing company (the original one, mind you) that takes submissions for these things.  Though I finished the original story in just three days, I'm taking my time this time to get it done right.  I've already completed several steps in order to do it.  The originals were locked away on a 3.5" disk and I had to build a computer just to read it and copy it, for example.

Anyway, the writing was done sixteen years ago and I'm in the middle of the first major rewrite since then.  Then I'll rewrite it again.  And again probably. 

Trouble is, I'm broke.  I'll have money again in a couple weeks, so I figure that's as good a deadline as any.  I want the book done by then, and I want it mailed a couple days after that.  I'll allow that much time for the vagaries of time and space and the post office.  Unfortunately, I'm not in control of such things.  It doesn't mean that it'll get published, but I'm hoping so. 

That process will take much longer, I'm afraid.

- Jim