A Cinderella Story

After a sleepy month of deep cleaning, the lodge nearly fills up tomorrow with Thanksgiving visitors. For the past couple days, everyone’s run around with a “company’s coming!” attitude. Most days have been spent scouring floors with a Cinderella-ish fervor, washing furniture, cleaning windows, and if you’re me, managing to step off of the fireplace ledge (only a foot drop) and scraping your arm against the stonework.

It’s no time to count bruises though. Since I work a half-day tomorrow in order to spend the afternoon in town helping Mom with preparations for the community Thanksgiving dinner she coordinates, tomorrow morning will be spent running around from cabin to cabin, making sure everything’s just so. Unlike Cinderella, we don’t have any little birds and mice to help us and the clock’s already dangerously close to the proverbial midnight hour.

I’ve acquired another article assignment from a regional publication I haven’t yet written for. Pressure’s on to do a good job and turn it into a regular writing gig. I have another article I need to conduct interviews for soon and I’m anticipating another assignment or two in the coming week. Good Lord. Could I actually be turning into a writer?!

In other, non-deadline oriented, writing news the novel continues chugging along happily. I realize I’m in the rewriting stage, but each morning when it hits 7:00, marking the time for me to eat breakfast and think about heading to work, I don’t want to stop writing because I’m genuinely excited about what happens next. It’s pretty fun turning an abysmal rough draft into a decent first draft, although I acknowledge that the story will probably get edited at leastone more time before I let a professional editor looks at it.

I must be doing something right though if I want to stay in the story all day. The pacing is definitely evening itself out; a huge relief considering the clunky state of the rough draft. The rough draft mostly consists of plot enabling events kept separate by a few hundred extraneous words to serve as a “transition.” Now the story’s beginning to read like, well, a book. I’ll refrain from calling that a miracle, but I kind of think it is.