Plant Butt in Chair II

Even with butt in chair, one may not write. Email, surfing the web (see prior post) and OTHER STUFF can put a barricade between the writer and productivity. This is particularly true for doing things that are no fun at all, like a chapter by chapter outline.

It's done and I'm tweaking it. I found a detailed synopsis (totally forgotten) which I broke down into chapters, took out the quotes and filled in a little. Took one evening instead of all week. Working smarter not harder always pays off. I gave the chapters cool names that reflect the chapter topics. Put the pages on the doc, too. Whether this is actually what the agent wants, I haven't a clue.

And of course, looking at the outline I see at least one chapter where there's an awful lot of spa treatment talk and not much action, definitely a "woman's chaper." So perhaps I should take my red pen and cut a few hundred words. Oh Lordy, if I could come in under 97,000 words that would be so good. At one point the book was 120,000 and later 112,000 and now 97,400.

Made southern corn bread (recipe is 200 years old) tonight and I don't like the buttermilk mix as well as "real" buttermilk. No sugar added. Stone ground corn meal. Authentic.

I like authenticity. I didn't like all the stupid labels, Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger and Coach on the stuff at Macy's esp. the really dumb Coach boots. The stores have too much stuff and it requires way too much effort to sort through all those racks. Give me a little boutique anyday. Winter white is back. It's a bitch to keep clean. Frump Grump.

Time to take down the Halloween decorations. S.O. put up the outside lights today. Very tasteful strands of Italian lights, nothing garish. We decorated our wreath last year and now of course I have to find the decorations. I did find an envelope labeled 37 Christmas stamps. Ooops! 37 cents. Now to write a cheerful upbeat Christmas letter, a thing I swore I would never do. Never say never.

Tomorrow is the first of December. Ye gods, in a few weeks Christmas will have come and gone. Better hustle.

Grapeshot