This, that, the holidays.

Things are good. Things are weird. Things are tiring. It’s just that time of year I suppose and I’m looking forward to this Friday when my holiday begins and I’m off work for sixteen days in a row. That’s some kind of record for me in the last few years – rarely do I take more than a week at a time off – which is how I ended up with five weeks of leave in my bank as we get close to the end of the year. Why not use it? Because right now I pretty much just want to lie down and sleep for days and days, so exhausted by the season even as I enjoy the parties and socializing.

I’ve just accepted another offer on my house as of last night, since it appears that the people who first offered are not going to come through (they have until midnight tonight to remove the subjects) due to some kind of financing problem. We’ll see of course, it could happen that all their paperwork gets taken care of this afternoon, but generally my experience has been that when people are last-minute it means they don’t have it together. In any case, another woman has put in an offer on the place and we have an agreed-upon price so if these folks don’t come through it’s onto the next one and hopefully that goes alright. I try not to get my hopes up but really the whole thing stresses me out because I want to be done with that property more than anything at the moment.

I’m at 58,000 words and the novel is working for me this week – as opposed to last week when I wanted to shred it up into little pieces and compost it in the backyard. I think I’ve got about 25,000 more words to finish, but I really don’t know at this point and I would just like to get the whole story down on paper before I start with the rewrite process which will bring more consistency to the whole thing. I have no idea right now whether I’m going to try to edit this to a publishable state or just treat it as “practice”. What I do know is that I’ve got a lot more confidence on output as a result, and I’m looking forward to some short story writing in the new year when I take a break from the novel in between versions.

And not that I’m thinking ahead or anything but I’ve decided that my birthday in February should be a salon-style affair loosely based on the 17th and 18th century French tradition of the literary salon. A performance affair in which people bring their own literary work or another contemporary piece to read or perform (as in a skit or a musical piece) for the rest of the participants. Back in university I had friends that held such events occasionally and have found myself thinking of doing this for awhile – so why not in February? More details on that as I figure them out because the hostess or salonierre sets ground rules for discussion and I have no idea what those would be.