I'm at something of a loose end this morning. I arrived about 7:45, ready to dive into the day's tasks, only to discover that our internet access was out. I had to wait over an hour for anyone else to show up so I could complain about it. Unfortunately, none of the people who have arrived so far actually know how to fix it and since it's now nearly 10:00, I'm starting to get fractious.

It's surprising how much of my work is done through e-mail. If I can't send and receive e-mails, my workload seems to drop by at least 50%, which is a bit of a mixed blessing. (On the one hand, it's good to have breathing room. On the other hand, I went to all the trouble of getting out of bed and driving here, so it's a bit aggravating to sit here, twiddling my thumbs.)

Lemme see…what's new?

I've been inspired by various things to go revamp my website, so that's on the schedule for this weekend. To make said revamping worthwhile, Lynnzo and I have challenged each other to come up with something new, a story or at least a stand-alone scene, to post to our respective pages.

I spent some time browsing through my abandoned story files last night, hoping to find something that could be fixed up and posted, but no luck. It's sad. I must have 200 pages worth of stuff buried on my hard drive, all of which deserves to be buried.

It was interesting to look back through it, though. In the HL file, I found my First Ever Fanfiction Story. I didn't realize I still had a copy of it. Nor did I realize that I started writing fanfiction eight years ago.

If I remember correctly, the Unfinished Opus was about 50 pages long when I came to the abrupt realization that it stunk. (Up until that moment, the pleasure of listening to Methos had distracted me from seeing that I didn't have anything to say.)

I didn't actually look at that particular text last night, you understand. There's no way a first effort isn't going to be painfully bad, it was already late, and I'd had a hard enough day without deliberately inflicting more pain on myself, but from a historical perspective, it's interesting to know the file exists.

(I'd like points for this entry. It may be mind-numbingly boring, but by gosh at least I'm not whining about things, okay?)

I also found the Penalty Box. When I was writing in HL and the characters weren't behaving themselves, I used to put them in the Penalty Box for a while.

The Penalty Box is one of those horribly bad, no-reason-to-exist-but-sex, poorly characterized, story-like trifles that sensible people are too smart to display publicly, but it used to be therapeutic to lock Methos into it from time to time. He used to give me a lot of trouble.

I found several essentially completed HL stories that never saw the light of day. I'm a bit proud of that.

It's not everyone who understands that just because something got written doesn't mean it's worth reading. I think I demonstrated remarkable maturity, don't you?

I didn't find much in the way of stories in the XF file. I found scraps of dialogue, one-sentence story ideas, deleted scenes, and one or two attempts at plots that went nowhere, but that's about it. I guess you don't wind up with as many failures if you're not actually trying to create something. XF was all about the PWP for me. There's a fair amount of really bad PWP material I abandoned, but I it's hard to regret it. I spent an average of six hours writing each story I wrote for XF, about the amount of time it took to type it. I rarely bothered with editing or beta readers, so writing in that fandom wasn't really work within the meaning of the act. More like typing practice.

(I'll bet you're all wishing my internet access would come back and I'd go back to work, aren't you? I knoew I am. DiamondGirl arrived about five minutes ago. I've got my fingers crossed that she'll work some magic on the network.)

And then, of course, there's OaT. OaT was my Last Fannish Love before I abandoned the fantasy that I was a writer.

I abandoned a lot of stuff there, if you measure in terms of page count. Two, or maybe three, longish stories that actually got "the end" stuck on them before investigation proved that I had, in fact, written dozens of pages of complete crap. What I need is a way to figure that kind of thing out before I waste a month writing something.

There are two stories that didn't quite get that far because I really liked the story ideas and refused to keep working on them when I was forced to admit that my writing was getting worse, line by line.

Hooray! Internet access! (DiamondGirl couldn't fix it, but one of the Stooges finally showed up.)

Back to work....