I vaguely recall, a couple of days ago (alright, so it was nearly a month and that's how lost I am) that I was going to stop missing days, on this whole blogging thing.

I'll wait until you're done laughing.

We're getting closer to the point where I can be honest about that giant project in the background that's eating my life. Granted, I'm relatively sure everyone who actually reads this thing already knows about it...

But we're not quite ready for launch yet, and I'm keeping quiet until we are. 

It's Well Written Wednesday and since I'm allowed to talk about writing (spuriously) I'm going to talk about what it feels like to have an 'author's' life on the internet anymore. 

There are currently, on that nifty little panel that Google gives you to pick which username you want to sign in with, eight choices. My to-do lists in Wunderlist consistently exist about a half-step away from being utterly out of control. I am either responsible for--or nearly responsible for--four blogs, three twitter accounts, probably more like twelve email addresses if you count the non-google ones, one web forum I have utterly failed at for months, and three websites. Not counting the giant PROJECT OF DOOM I'm not actually owning up to yet I've got Nano, some involvement in First Book, my own writing career, a position as the Enrichment Coordinator for my son's school, the Book Lover's Bazaar coming up in September, and another nine and a half weeks as a full-time childcare person.

Arguably, at the end of all of that I should be talking about the impending crash, should I?

But I'm fine. Not even pretending at fine, I'm actually fine. Sure, there are moments where it feels a little big. Like tonight, when I signed out of Google for a second and got slapped in the face with way more directions than I needed right then. There's a sort of constant cloud of things that haven't made it on a to-do list yet swimming around in my brain, and I'm still having dreams about the PROJECT OF DOOM that basically equate to my brain getting caught in circles because I'm spending a lot of time staring at the same information is sixty different ways. 

Someone mentioned Camp Nano, next month, the other night and I just laughed hysterically. We won't tell anyone I was laughing because it should be 'oh god NO' but I will absolutely, I nearly promise, be writing something. 

Welcome to life as a modern writer. I'm decently hopeful it's not like this for everyone.

So. Much. Work.

Literally. I have absolutely nothing useful to say today. It is 10:43 at night, I am exhausted, and tomorrow is the last day of school. Also, my to-do list is still incredibly long.

Don't worry, soon enough there will be big announcements, and all will become clear.

Also, I solemnly swear there will be a nifty, awesome Sci-Fi Friday this week, if I have to hunt down an actual robot for it.

My son keeps asking me when we're going to have flying cars. "When will it be the future?" suddenly became a question, somewhere about halfway through first grade. 

And I can't tell you how disappointed he is, when I tell him they've been promising me things like flying cars since I was his age and it hasn't happened yet. That being said, given the way I see other people act in parking lots and on clogged roads, I'm not particularly on the band-wagon for flying cars. 

Any more than I'm on the band-wagon for those things down there.

Those nifty, idyllic things are called an O'Neill Cylinder. Basically, back in the seventies a Princeton genius theorized these designs for space colonies built from materials on the moon and harvested from asteroids, rather than dealing with the exorbitant cost of firing things into space. Two cylinders connected by a manufacturing center would spin and cause their own artificial gravity. The massive windows into space would make it easier to always be pointed at the sun, and he was sure, in the seventies, it could be done with modern methods and materials. 

The British Interplanetary Society has picked it back up, as of last year. They've named it Project SPACE (seriously, Study Project Advancing Colony Engineering) and they recon with the new lower cost shuttle replacements hopefully on the horizon it's only a matter of time. 

And my response to this? 

Not if you paid me. 

I get that we need to get into space. Maybe not for all the reasons people usually espouse (I don't buy we're killing the planet, actually. I figure it'll kill us long before we get there. I don't believe we'll over-populate it either for a whole host of reasons), but I still think we need to go. We need to go because the worst things in our history have happened when we stopped wondering what was over that hill way over there. When we stop striving and looking and dreaming all we're left with is what we are. I think sometimes we don't like ourselves very much.  

Which is sad, and symptomatic of a whole other list of problems that spring from this massive human tendency toward negativity we've never quite managed to shake. 

So why don't I want to go into space? Let's just say the Fermi Paradox has been the boogeyman in my mental closet since long before I knew what it was. I more or less own the fact I'm afraid of the dark.

I finished my first, official edits this week. Well. I say 'finished.' I never actually feel finished, but it was deadline (I had a whole hour and thirteen minutes to spare, it was fine). 
Which has left me staring at the calendar, determinedly not thinking about the few days of freedom I have left until the summer starts. 
And wondering what to do now. 
So, in deference to that, this is all you're getting for Well Written Wednesday this week, and I'm going to go do something fun. I suggest you do the same.

And dear god, don't fall into your 'old projects' folder, whatever you do. 

According to my mother I decided I wanted to be a Paleontologist when I was three. I had an early, avid fascination with all things Dinosaur. Sometimes it wondered off in other directions--for a solid year I gobbled up everything I could find about the Titanic, off and on in my teens I wandered into Grail Lore and Arthurian legend. But I always went back to dinosaurs. 

Jurassic Park was probably my first honest fictional obsession. I read the book until it fell apart, and watched the movie as many times as I could, and suffered through the video game, and listened to the soundtrack, and mentally wrote myself into the story in a million different ways. I bought the ridiculous merchandise, and my mother encouraged this--she even bought me a set of Jurassic Park sheets once when I was like sixteen--I think because she was secretly enamored of the idea her teenage daughter wanted to be a scientist.

Sometimes I think if the internet had existed when I was properly little, I might have hung on to that past the first semester of college (probably not, Chemistry kicked my butt good). I spent a lot of time on dinosaurs, but nobody told me about Mary Anning. Nobody told me the story of a little girl playing on the cliffs of Dorset with her brother, who found a fossil that changed the world. Who went on to become one of the first paleontologists ever. 

Next time you see a plesiosaur, think of Mary Anning. Because dinosaurs are cool, whether you're a scientist or not.

Also, apparently the closest word spell-checker can come up with for plesiosaur is applesauce.

I have a fever alright? And it was grocery shopping day, and then my husband wanted to go out for a date and...

Do you need more excuses, or does that cover it? Can I talk about Malefecent now?

I know technically it's not Sci-fi, and even if it were it wod be better suited to Wednesday... It's 10:28 on a Friday and I'm an I'll person. Take what you can get.

Which isn't going to be much. There's no adequate way for me to tell you about this movie without a seriously epic amount of spoilage. Just go see it, it's worth the ticket price. 

So...um...tie in. Right. 

Somewhere back a ways I talked about the "boo-hiss-man evil" trope in science fiction. Apparently I forgot it was a thing in Fantasy too. Or I think maybe I internalized it in fantasy. So much of that revolves around how precious the earth is I don't notice the correlations so much. Which makes me wonder if there's a more nuanced accounting in Sci-fi and I just havent found it yet. Any suggestions?

Okay, the sicky is going to bedfordshire now. Leave your comments/suggestions/fever dreams down in the thingy.

This is what happens when I don't write my blog posts over the weekend. 

I have every intention of Sci-Fi Friday happening tomorrow, but for today we need to talk a little about my goals for June and pretend any of us think they're going to happen (hahahaha).

So. Last month I said I was going to--
A) Finish the edits on Watcher, and Camp Nano
B) Finish a blanket

I don't even know what to say about that. I'm about three-quarters of the way done with Watcher. I don't feel bad about that, the last two weeks got eaten by other projects that involve the book that's actually got a publisher. Obviously that takes precedent over nearly everything else. 

And I almost wish that was what had happened with the Camp Nano novel. But it's not. That one fell flat on its face. I look at it once in a while, and it flails around there on the floor pathetically. It doesn't look like it's going to grow legs any time soon. I might have to let it go.

So what's actually happening in June? 

1) I'll save you the insane task list. Let's just say I have a whole lot of charity/school work going on this month, and I intend to get it done.
2) Major secret project I'm not talking about in detail yet, but when it goes public you'll know. There is much stuff that needs to happen with this, too. Very stuff. Muchness.
3) A month with no missed blog posts. Seriously people, if it's Monday, Wednesday, or Friday and you haven't heard from me by 5 I expect to be wet-noodled for all I'm worth.

Alright. Are we ready? After all, the point of the Year of Creative Pursuits was to learn to be useful across a year. I keep telling myself it doesn't matter how many times I fail, the point is the learning.

No picture today, I'm a little behind. If you've got one for me drop it there in the commenty stuff.