My neck, pervert. It has been for the last two or three days and it's not getting much better. Unfortunately I'm in the middle of an internet research project at the office and there's nothing, just nothing better for a stiff neck than sitting in one place, mousing around the 'net for eight or nine straight hours. Doing it three days in a row really adds to the benefits, as you can imagine.

Last night I had to turn on the little heater in my bedroom because it was so cool. Today it's 90 degrees outside. I love autumn in Colorado.

Okay, let's get the usual diet update over with. Last night I weighed in for the first time in two weeks. I hadn't lost an ounce. I had a bitty temper tantrum (why, oh why do I do those things, as though it's their fault that I haven't lost any weight?*) and then condescended to accept a little one-on-one counseling. If I follow this guy's instructions closely, he says I should easily expect to see a 2 lb loss by Monday. Yeah.

But it's worth a shot, so I'm making a few dietary and exercise changes and we'll just wait and see what happens. In any case, you'll be pleased to know that I'm sticking with my quit date of November 15. Whatever weight I have or haven't lost by then will have to be enough.

(* It's worth mentioning, or even it it's not, I'm compulsively honest so I'm mentioning it, that I reviewed my private "sins and omissions" chart this morning and discovered that I've been indulging myself to a shocking extent over the last 2-3 weeks, so it's not really surprising that I wasn't losing any weight. In one four-day period, I ate an entire "grab bag" sized bag of Fritos.)

On the NaNoWriMo front, I've been invited to a gathering on 10/26. Apparently the Front-Range participants have a forum on the NaNoWriMo site and they do a couple of "encourage each other' type meetings during the course of the month. I haven't responded to the invitation because I still don't know if I'm going to be participating. I mean, aside from another characterization-free smutfest, I've no idea what I'd write about.

A friend wrote me privately, musing over her own ideas for a novel if she should decide to participate. I confess, I'm strongly encouraging her to stay away from writing anything fannish. First, I don't want to be the only person in the contest writing pointless dreck and second, if she's anything like me (which she is), the kind of writing she's currently blocked on isn't the place to start when she's just trying to exercise her writing muscles.

Ideas were never my strong suit, anyhow. Personally I'm still considering picking up last year's chunk o'cheese and adding another 50k to it. It was just starting to develop a plot and some coherent characters last year and I'm a bit curious to know what, you'll pardon the expression, 'the muse' had in mind when it bypassed my brain to insert the aforesaid plot development in a place where I fully expected to need another 6k sex scene to pad out the word count.

There weren't any pirates in the story, a fact that I still regret. The only one of my own fandom efforts I remember with any fondness was a foray into the pirate genre. While the story itself was more than usually inane, I don't think I said all I have to say about pirates so maybe this new universe would be a good place to expand on that theme. (I could do some meaner pirates. That last bunch turned out to be kinda swishy.)

I diagrammed the universe all out last year. I have a world map, at least four, distinct cultures including social structure, religion, economics, and geography, two branches of "gipsy" or "rover" subcultures that interact with each of them, and some sketchy notions (they're not quite full-fledged ideas) of what conflicts motivate each of them. (Some days I'll do almost anything to avoid actually writing. World-planning is a lot more entertaining than writing.)

Okay, what else is new? I may not be losing weight (Hah! I'll bet you thought we were done with the diet topic for the day, didn't you?) but I'm losing inches. I'm going to have to buy new pants and most of the shirts I bought this past summer, all purchased a little large to accommodate my desire to camouflage the increasing bulk of my increasing butt, are starting to hang off my shoulders. So, this weekend's excursions will include some shopping, a pastime dear to my heart.

I can't think of anything else worth saying today. I mean, unless you'd like to hear my opinion on the article I'm currently reading, A Clinical Information System Research Landscape, I think that's pretty much it.