Over the weekend I gave my latest short story to my mother to read.  I don’t give them to her for editing purposes, ’cause, well, it’s my mom, and she doesn’t really have it in her to be critical of my stuff.  Then, yesterday:

Mom: Your story was really great.  I really liked it.

Me: Aw, shucks.  (No, really.  I said that.)

Mom:  It’s just that, when I was reading it, I kinda felt like there was something missing.

Me (in my head): OMG, can it be?  Is she actually going to give me a real, honest-to-god critique?   Sweet. This is new.  There must be two blue moons in the sky.

Mom: But then this morning I was looking at it again and I figured out what was missing.

Me: Oh?

Mom: A couple of pages.

Me: …

It didn’t feel right putting up a post without talking about writing, so here’s a post about writing.

When it comes to the mystery novel I was working on, it turns out that the third time is not the charm.  It usually is for me, but apparently not this time.  I think I’ve figured out what I need to do to make it work, but I’ve also got a different idea that I’d like to try, and have stupidly signed up for NaNo again this year – despite the fact that I get my ass handed to me every year – so the mystery is going to be on hold until December 1st.  But that’s okay, because, while I haven’t been working on the mystery, I’ve actually managed to finish two short stories.  One I wrote from scratch in about a week and a half, and it’s already out on submission.  The other had been sitting on my hard drive since July, and it will be going out either today or tomorrow, as soon as I figure out the most suitable place to send it.

I don’t really know why I bother to do NaNo, except that it’s fun to be involved in something so big.  My inner editor is extremely critical and never shuts up, which makes it next to impossible for me to churn out the amount of words needed to finish in time.  But so far I have three friends who’ve signed up for it, at least one of whom is almost guaranteed to kick my ass, and so I’ll continue with my annual tradition of beating my head against the wall for the sake of fun.  Reading that back, it occurs to me that I seem to have a bit of a masochistic streak.  Tiff is going to have a ball with that comment, I can see it now…

And, speaking of Tiff…  I normally wouldn’t dream of mentioning the names of one of my beta readers in a public forum.  Not because I don’t appreciate their hard work, and not because I don’t think credit should be given where it’s due.  It’s because, in a world where every writer serious about their craft would kill to find a good reader, doing so is akin to throwing that friend into shark-infested waters and then dumping chum on their head.  But, in a total of three days over the past week, Tiff has edited – with a fine-tooth comb, I might add – both of those short stories I finished, which total 13,000 words.  That’s a lot of line editing in a short amount of time, and I wouldn’t have made the deadline for the first story without her help, so I just wanted to take a moment to say thanks.  I <3 you, Editing Wench.

This post is a little… okay a lot, more emo than I usually get.  I’m great at expressing anger, and sarcasm is my default setting, but I’m not very good at expressing the gentler side of the emotional spectrum, which means that sometimes there are important things that get left unsaid.  I’ve decided I’m going to try not to do that quite so much anymore, and a day set aside for giving thanks seemed like an appropriate time to start.

In the past couple of months, I’ve had two rather extreme reminders of why people shouldn’t take their friends for granted.  The first, which in the end turned out to be a huge misunderstanding, gave me a kind of Scrooged preview into what it would have been like if this friend was no longer in my life.  Short version: my life would be a much emptier place without her.  The second was much more serious, because the second friend, my best friend for the last 17 years, came very close to dying.  She’s on the mend now, and should be fine, but this was a really big wake-up call for me, and not just for the obvious reason.  Over the years we’ve gone through times where we don’t see each other for a while – sometimes months, and sometimes even longer – but the next time we’d get together it would always be like no time had passed at all, and I’ve always believed that she would always be there, that we would one day be old and grey and still getting together like no time had passed, because that’s the way we’ve always been.  I can’t even imagine my life without her in it, but there are no guarantees, and I’m going to do my best to never forget that.

On a happier note, I’ve been getting to know a new friend recently whose opinions and beliefs about many things, including writing – you had to know it was going to come around to that eventually – are, in his words, "scarily close" to mine.  Not that I want all my friends to think and act the same as I do – that would be pretty damn boring – but it is nice to have one friend who just seems to get it .  Somehow it makes the world seem not quite so big.

I’m not going to name names – I’d feel awful if I accidentally left someone out – but to all my friends, I just want to say thank you.  I’m richer for knowing you, and even if I don’t always say it, please know that it’s always true.