I have so many things to talk about that I put on hold for the last month. Everything looks like crap, though. I know it’s the Demon of Perfection spitting all over my ideas, but I haven’t been able to get it back into the box yet.

I got DDR Ultramix 2 for the Xbox, but I was so busy this month, that I have only played it once. Before I started NaNoWriMo, I had been so excited for its release, but now, all of that seems so silly and superficial. Why can’t I bear to put the game in the controller? Well, I can’t play the songs on anything higher than beginner, which isn’t really a workout for me, so playing the game is just playing the game for fun. I can’t have fun, I have chapters to write.

I told myself that I was going to take a month off and not write a word for a month, but my fingers have all of these muscles from writing every day and they get restless if I leave them with nothing to do. I wrote over 14,000 words in two days. I can’t expect to go cold turkey, can I?

I left them all in a bind in the last chapter. Simon was sick with a fever and Herod’s soldiers were on the road behind the swell. What is a swell? I imagined it to be a kind of rolling hill like you see in movies set in Great Britain. We don’t have hills like that. We have huge, lurking mountains or flatness. Of course, they aren’t in Great Britain or Utah. They are dunking Simon in a lake that may or may not exist in ancient Israel.

See that? See that last paragraph? That’s why I need to take a break from writing fiction. The problem is that when I try to go back to my regularly scheduled blogging, the Demon of Perfection gets all medieval on every idea I have.

The worst of it is that I feel like I’ve run a huge race and there were only three people at the finish line cheering for me. I know there have been over a hundred of you reading my chapters every time they’ve shown up. Those numbers on the stats just don’t cheer loudly enough to hear all the way here in SLC.

The Utah State Library for the Blind never got back to me, so I sent them a $300 check. Twenty hours at my current salary is less than that, but I think I called to St. Lucia about twenty times a day last month. I’m also working on recording my chapters as MP3s so that anyone who is blind can listen to them. Voice work is a nice break from writing fiction.

Maybe I’ll feel better tomorrow.