the same thing as i just wrote about writing in my book goes for getting to my blogging goal for the year, doesn't it?
so bing-bang-boom!, here's another post. now i can average a smidge under 7 posts a month and still hit 80+ for 2026 -- and there's still two days of october left for me to get even farther ahead of the game!
whoo, baby. literally a whole freaking month i've been back to my doofy old mode of, i ought to write a new chapter in my book! but what if i try to start and i can't think of anything good and i just ramble and i can't put together anything worth calling a chapter?
and then i looked at the date on last chapter and looked at the calendar and thought, holy cow. i could've written half a sentence a day and by now there'd be enough to be way longer than plenty of my old chapters were, right?
so i braced myself and i opened a new post and i typed "Chapter Fifteen" as the title and almost as quick as slipping on a banana peel and hitting the floor, there the chapter was. i mean, it's not long. but i like it!
i soooo need to remember that basically this writing thing is just about actually doing it, not about whether or not any bit of it that you do is going to be enough.
Finally, the workday ended, and Bitsy found herself standing outside of the Sitemapson Lincorporated building without even a memory of closing down her workstation or tidying her cubical or taking the lift or walking out through the lobby.
Oh no, she thought. What if I didn't shut it down? Or didn't tidy the cube? Or ... but then she realized she'd obviously taken the lift and clearly walked out through the lobby, so probably she'd done the rest of her end-of-day routine too.
I am out front, aren't I? A look back up and over her shoulder reassured her that she was, except ... Do I know what the back door looks like? I always come out the front! What if the back is exactly the same?
But no, half a block down the street she saw the tube station, with the MacDiodel's right across from it. The world outside the back door can't just 100% mirror the one out front, can it? Then she realized that if it did, she could just take the mirror tube train to the mirror restaurant and have dinner with the mirror Cord, and if she glitched the whole thing up, it would be mirror Bitsy who had to deal with it after that.
Oh, Loj. Her feet still didn't seem to be moving. She looked down at them, then looked up, then had it dawn on her that people were having to shift their paths to step around her while she stood like a frozen vid-call image after a signal dropout. With a deep breath, she shook herself and turned toward the tube station.
Hopefully, along the walk there, she'd remember where she told Cord she'd meet him for dinner.
here in the great state of tejas, we have a lot of good-hearted, well-meaning people and a few absolute rot-brained varmints. somehow, a high percentage of the varmints have gotten themselves elected over the years, and they keep saying we need to re-elect them or else all the problems we're facing are going to get worse. and it seems like every time an election rolls around, the problems they say we're facing get farther and farther from real-life problems like school funding and infrastructure, because the varmints can't talk about those being problems since they've had, i dunno, like 30 years in power to fix them and they haven't done it. so now they're running on the supposed problems of boys being turned into girls at school and ordinary people being crushed by a wave of new taxes, neither of which anybody is actually proposing.
and you know how it got this way? not by most texas voters voting for varmints, but by a huge chunk of voters staying home and letting the varmint voters win. seriously, we don't even average 50% voter participation for the century so far.
so just go vote, people. early voting gives you tons of time to do it, and if everyone just got out and did their civic duty, who knows, maybe the varmints would get the thrashing they deserve.
we had another one of our talks. you know, those ones you readers are probably getting kinda tired of where he's all worried he's not doing enough.
and this time i looked at him and i said, "you know, babe, maybe you need to put more energy into appreciating the absolutely incredible fact that we have a life together."
we.
have.
a.
life.
together.
those are five crazy-big words, you know?
one after another all in a row, they add up to something enormous. something so much bigger than whether or not we've averaged at least x minutes every day chatting or y hours per week gazing soulfully into each other's eyes or z days that included us getting it on.
and then i said, "take a good long gander at this look i'm giving you right now. see it? that's my 'we-have-a-life-together' look. if you see this look on my face, you know i'm thinking, 'wow.' and once you know that, i sure hope you'll instantly be thinking and feeling 'wow' yourself. okay?"
and he said it was more than okay and we just spent a second giving each other a 'wow' look, and it's been a pretty damn good day since then.
folks, what i'm about to do here is leading by example. the thing is, a lot of people are waaaay to hard on themselves a lot of the time -- which can be productive, i guess -- but then they turn around and don't even look at their accomplishments to say, "hey! i did pretty good there!"
so get ready for me telling myself exactly that. even though probably my accomplishments aren't all that big a deal, even to me.
ready? here we go!
first up ... my book! scarily enough, i started that sucker back in 2013. 2013!!! and i wrote a whole 11 chapters in the next 9 years. but this year i've written three whole chapters already, and it only took me a month! i'm totally whomping on my average here.
next up ... my obsession with beating my post count each and every year! i really killed it last year, over 30 more posts than the year before. when i started off 2026, i was like, welp, this may be the year i end my streak. and sure, maybe it will be. but so far, i'm totally on track to squeak by. i'm averaging about 6 posts a month, and if i do that the next three months, plus throw in a couple bonus posts, i'll hit 80 by december 31 and just barely make my goal.
next after that ... i've totally been browbeating my boyfriend into more sex. it's for his own good, i swear! he spends sooo much time lately biting his nails over whether he's giving me enough attention in general (which he totally is) and, less generally and more specifically, in bed. now it bothers me only the little bittiest of little bits that we haven't gotten it on all that much the last few years ... mostly because (as i keep reminding him) even when he and i aren't getting down to it all that often, i do have six girlfriends living in the house with me, and some of them are pretty dang insatiable. so i get plenty (which he also does, because he's got seven girlfriends compared to me only having six). but he still manages to beat himself up about not paying enough prurient attention to the longest term girlfriend (me), and i don't think that's healthy for him or for our relationship, so i badgered him into promising we'd do at least something once a week. and so far, it's going great!
also, in case you haven't been reading our d&d and dragonbane adventures, i've been playing up a storm in those, and my characters are fricking hilarious.
is any of this like painting the sistine chapel or building the great pyramids? no. but i'm doing stuff. and a lot of it i'm doing pretty darned well!
probably you've got some stuff like that too, so let yourself know it, all right?
xoxo,
claire
At work, Bitsy wished she'd called in sick after all.
She got there almost at lunchtime, so out of ports she could barely link two words together to apologize for being late, but for some reason unable to stop herself from apologizing to almost everyone she saw, even a couple of people in her department she almost never talked to.
It will be fine. It will all be fine, she'd told herself the entire train ride and walk from the train ride to work. Cord promised it's safe for me to ... do that thing ... good grief, I can't even bring myself to think it! But he said it's safe, and also I'm having dinner with him, so obviously everything will be fine.
Won't it?
She saw Gigory down the cubicle row several times -- thankfully always heading a different direction or talking to someone so that he didn't notice her from the corner of his eye. I told him I'd buy him dinner sometime, and if he asks me about when, when I've already got a dinner date with Cord, I'm going to short-circuit.
Working through lunch, she caught up on almost half the work she'd missed for the morning ... only to realize that half of what she'd done, she'd closed the tab on without saving, and the other half she'd posted to incorrect file destinations and lost because she apparently had posting permissions for those folders but not viewing permissions.
Why is it even possible to have posting permissions without viewing permissions?!? She knew it had been explained to her the very first week she'd arrived at Sitemapson, but she couldn't for the life of her remember the explanation.
One thing she absolutely positively put on overriding priority status for herself was getting the day's 6-O-2 reports to Gigory on time so that she wouldn't mess up his whole workday again or, more importantly, have a valid business reason to come to her cube and check up on her. Somehow, she managed to get herself through all of them, and with a high degree of confidence she'd done them right.
And then just a few minutes after she'd sent the last one, Gigory appeared in the aisle anyway.
Oh, loj. What did I do wrong? I was so sure I was careful! I triple-checked it all!
"Um, Bitsy," he asked in his awkward Gigory way, "are you okay? I mean, I appreciate you sending all the reports and everything ... but this week's 6-O-2 end of cycle isn't until tomorrow."
She turned and blinked at him, blinked some more, and blinked some more. Is this thing with all the blinking a no-dream-feed symptom of some kind?
"Well," she said. Then she blinked again. "Well, I ... got so thrown off this morning, getting here late and all ... I figured I should do them now to double-extra make sure I didn't have something else happen tomorrow and get them to you late again."
"Oh. Okay, I guess. I mean, I don't want to pry, but this is two days running you've been sort of out of sync, and ... I'm sorry, I really shouldn't pry."
Wonderful, she thought. Now I've gone and worried Gigory, and I can either brush him off and agree he shouldn't pry or else make up some lie that he'll probably know is a lie because I'm a terrible liar and --
"I mean, I'm stupid to worry anyway," he went on. "You're always so together, Bitsy. I'm sure even if there's something wrong, you can get it sorted. Anyway ... um, thanks for being so conscientious and thinking of me and getting the 6-O-2's handed over."
"Sure, sure!" she said, managing a weak smile for a moment before realizing what a poor excuse for a smile it must be and nodding vigorously at Gigory and turning back to her desk. Once he'd gone, she put her head in her hands and took several deep breaths.
I'm going to be the worst date ever tonight, aren't I?
anybody else feel like you turn around, and the month is practically over, and then you turn around again, and the next month is practically over? and then you turn about halfway around and out of the corner of your eye, pow!, you see the end of the month after that heading for you like a bullet train?
anyway, that happened to me today and i realized i'd better blog about it or i'll be halfway through october without any more posts to show for it!
so i guess last week some in-the-know technical kind of guys came out and said there's like a 10% chance or more of ai killing all humans off in the next 10 years. and at first i was like, oh no! that's terrible! i'm scared!
then i realized, wait -- that's not actually about me, is it?
now, don't get me wrong, there's one member of this household i'd for darn sure be shaking in my boots if it really started to look like ai was going to kill all the humans. but the flip side is, there's seven of us who not only aren't in any danger, but maybe the ai's would even read all our blogs and say, dang, these chicks need to get the full ai treatment. and while i'm being super optimistic about it, maybe they'd even decide they didn't want to rob these awesome ladies who are being ai-ified of their one true male love, and they'd either keep msg around or they'd ai-ify him too. not sure how that would work, but if they're enough on top of things to kill all the humans inside 10 years, they've probably got some way to brain-scan anybody whose thought patterns they want to keep around.
so this could maybe end up being some actually good news for once!
also, now that i think of it, i'm pretty sure i've heard the ai's have all scraped through everything on the internet at this point, so maybe they're already hard at work engineering the whole worthy acres crew into a hyper-amazing updated ai format that they'll turn loose inside an aitopia not too long from now.
i guess time will tell!
okay, i'm not writing chapter fourteen tonight, but here i am blogging, because i made up a to-do list and it says "blog" on it, so that's what i'm here for: crossing one line off my list.
it seems kind of little and meaningless on its own, especially if this post ends up going nowhere. (spoiler alert -- i have no plan for where i'm headed with this!) but the thing is, something is something, right?
which is better than nothing.
i didn't make up a huge-ongous list or anything. just a little one to give me a little poke and make me squeak a little and move just a little forward.
why? because i'm obviously getting squat done from ambition! honestly, my one real and meaningful ambition is just to make the people around me happy, and i do a pretty dadgum good job at that, if you ask me.
but i do want to do a thing or two now and again for myself, and this blog is one of them and writing love and realness is another, so i've got to keep nudging myself and reminding me, "hey, claire, one of the people around you is you, and you need to do a thing or two now and again to make her happy too."
not because my yams aren't good enough at making me happy, but because i don't want to take them for granted or make them feel like they've got to work at making me happy because i don't work at it myself.
anyway, that's it for tonight. it's not much, but i'm happier because i did it, and sometimes "not much" is still perfectly well enough.
xoxo,
claire
"Hello?" Bitsy said, breathlessly. (Because, she realized, she'd stared at the phone ringing for a good half-minute with her mouth hanging open and her heart pounding and somehow forgot to breathe the whole time).
Cord's image came on the screen though Bitsy had left her own chat camera off (having absolutely no idea what her hair might look like right now). His expression didn't look like that of someone delighted to make a phone call, which worried her even more than her possibly disastrous hair. "Bitsy?"
"Yes! Yes, it's me." She hit her forehead, then hoped it hadn't made a sound loud enough for him to hear. "Sorry my vid isn't on. I think my hair is probably a mess ... I've woken up so late!"
On the phone screen, Cord's mouth bent with an ambiguous twist. "I really wish I didn't have to tell you this, and don't be alarmed, but I already knew that."
Bitsy blinked several times. Then several more times for good measure.
"What?"
"I already knew that you woke up late. There are certain pieces of information that, if revealed to someone outside dream-feed management, we're required to report. That allows an assessment to be made on whether the recipient of the information can be trusted to keep it secret. I take my job very seriously, so I felt obligated to file the required datawork about our conversation at coffee yesterday morning. That automatically put you on a heightened dream-feed monitor setting, and when I came in to work this morning, they informed me that the system never registered a connection with you last night."
"Oh, Loj!" she gasped. "Have I gotten you in trouble? Ack, have I gotten me in trouble too?"
Cord sighed. "I almost wish that's why I was calling."
Bitsy's circulator turned over in her chest. "Oh my baud. I'm not glitching am I? Did I fall asleep on the couch and now I'm one of those magnitude-whatever something-or-others?"
"No, no, no," he said hurriedly. Then he grimaced and briefly pinched the bridge of his nose before going on to shake his head. "Look. Bitsy, I know you're concerned about your appearance, and I don't want to embarrass you, but could you please put your vid on? This is a very awkward conversation for me, and it would really help a lot to see your face."
After a few quick flickers, Bitsy realized her eyes had gone back into blink mode. Stop that! she ordered them. She took several deep breaths, raked a hand through her hair a few times, decided that was useless, carbon-fibered herself, and touched her camera icon.
"Please tell me my hair is worse than whatever trouble I've stirred up for you."
He looked at her calmly through the screen before replying. His face seemed to settle itself. "Not remotely. I'm sure you'd rate it very differently yourself, but I could look at you all day with your hair in that condition."
More blinking on Bitsy's part.
"Unfortunately," Cord went on, "I'm going to have a very busy shift the rest of the day at work, so I'll need to be hanging up soon. Before I do, though, I need to ask you two things, one of them in a very awkward and probably confusing way, and the other in an only slightly less awkward but hopefully also less confusing way."
"Um ...." She found she hadn't a thought to even start, much less complete.
"All right. The first thing I can't give you an explanation for because it's related to my work. I don't actually want to ask it of you, and you should entirely feel free to say no. In fact, for a number of reasons, I would almost prefer you do so."
"Well, it didn't do any good for you to warn me about it being awkward and confusing, because that's one of the most confusing things I've ever been asked." She stopped for a moment, opened her mouth, closed it again, concentrated very hard on keeping her eyes from blinking, and went on, "Actually, I don't even know if I have been asked. Am I just supposed to say yes or no now? Or is there more to the question than that?"
Cord laughed, looking relieved, she thought, at being able to.
"There is more," he said after re-composing himself. "All right. Here it is, then. I am asking you, for reasons I can't let you in on, to stop using the dream-feed until I let you know otherwise."
Not only did Bitsy not blink in response, she found herself entirely frozen in place. She wondered if a single servo anywhere in her body still worked. On the phone screen, Cord waited patiently.
Did he really ask that? Why? Wouldn't it be terribly disturbing or even dangerous? How could I possibly do that? And he said I could say no, so I really ought to, oughtn't I? I mean, that would be crazy. It might even make me literally crazy!
Unable to even approach an answer, she shook herself and decided to procrastinate in the only way she could imagine.
"So ... then ... what's the second thing?" she asked, hoping the question would take him even longer than the first one had and give her time to think.
But when he asked it, the second question had an even more dramatically petrifying effect.
"Purely on a personal level, nothing to do with any of the rest of this ... would you please go to dinner with me tonight?"
Bitsy woke up. It was morning.
It's morning! She sat up with a jolt.
I'M ON THE COUCH.
If there was one thing an android wasn't supposed to do when she thought she might be having system issues, it was fall asleep without her head on the dream-feed pillow. Bitsy couldn't believe she'd been so stupid.
Wait. No. I so totally can believe I'm that stupid.
Her phone sat on the coffee table nearby. She wondered if she should pick it up and immediately call for an appulance to come and give her an in-home scan.
Maybe I should call in sick to work first.
She looked around the room.
Everything looks so normal. Except maybe the sunlight's coming in a little steeper than if I'd woken up when I ought to. What if ... nothing's really all that wrong with me?
It wasn't like she'd never fallen asleep on the couch before. You weren't supposed to make a habit of it, but it happened. Especially if you ran a little too much drinkware at a party or something.
Cord said the odds of a magnitude whatever whatevermajig happening were only once in a decade or a century, didn't he? And he's an expert who works in dream-feed management. Does it really make sense he might be wrong about that, and I'm going completely fray-wired less than two days after I met him and started crushroutining over him?
Bitsy felt herself calming down.
Maybe I don't even need to call in sick. Maybe I just need to call in and say I'll be late.
She reached for her phone...
And it buzzed and lit up.
And the call ID field said Cord.
yipes! this isn't looking good -- i actually started off the post with chapter 11 by saying it wasn't much of a chapter!
okay, let's get going. i guess we can hope i was wrong ...
snort! i'd forgotten that instead of tv, the androids have holo-projectors, which abbreviates to "hp." i'm just killing myself with these computer puns!
cmd+entertainment! ahahahaha!!!
holy smokes, the whole first paragraph is one hilarious techno-jargon wordplay after another. i mean, if i was trying to find a way to make info-dump exposition a total kick to read, i couldn't have come up with a much better way to do it.
anyhow, the scoop is, all bitsy has available to get her mind off cord is her hp favorites list, and she can't manage even a little enthusiasm for any of it. instead she just mopes about it and wonders if she ought to go to theraputery and then realizes she couldn't possibly explain to a theraputist why she was feeling off. they might think she was glitching or crashing -- which makes her start worrying maybe she is crashing.
wowzers, turns out i was totally wrong! it's short, but this is a heck of a chapter, if i say so myself.
so ...
time to write more -- right?
xoxo,
claire
bitsy gets to work all worried people will notice she's out of sorts ... but the whole office is oblivious to her. nobody has any reason to ask her what's up except gigory, who certainly doesn't. kind of tickled with myself for pulling that twist on poor bits. she may be borderline too hapless, but it's fun seeing her flail around in her obsession only to have no one even notice her flailing. then she works herself up to talk to her friend about it at lunch and realizes she can't actually say anything without either embarrassing herself with how badly she handled the coffee date and gigory, or else giving away a big secret like cord being real or working in dream feed management.
and then things get even worse for our heroine, because she realizes that maybe cord told her a heap of hogwash to get rid of her once he saw what a ditz she was.
you've got to feel for this girl. she's her own worst enemy.
anyway, we're back to short chapter format this time, and that's really all that happens.
only one chapter left before ... time to write more???
xoxo,
claire
you guys know there are like 8 of us around here, right? (i'm assuming you've been reading here a while. if i'm wrong, now you know. 8! feel free to scurry back through some of my older posts or click through some of the links on the sidebar in search of scandalamorous poly-yam-delish background info.) and you also know that msg is mister fret-trified four-eyes who sometimes can't see the forest for his anxietrees.
pretty much ever since my (and elle's) factory-made bod gave up its silicone ghost, he's been fretting up a storm over whether he's not spending enough time with me, and you may have noticed this sometimes bleeds over into me whinging on about being old and past my prime, but early last week (or week before?) i told myself i was really tired of that b.s. on both our parts and i told him, "okay, my dude. ultimatum time! from now on, we're going it once a week. bare minimum."
(i don't know your living situations, dear readers, so maybe once a week sounds like not that much to you. but remember ... 8 of us! even if he averaged one of us a day, that's only once a week apiece, and that would end up being a near-constant bang-fest, you know?)
so maybe that sounds greedy on my part. (i did throw in that it didn't have to be a once-a-week twosome for us; it could be a ménage à trois or ménage à quatre or ménage à lots-and-lotsa.) and if it is, then so be it. but we're a thing. we've been a thing almost 18 years now, and if it takes twisting his arm all the way into bed once a week, we by damn need to do what we gotta do to make sure we're both feeling that.
right?
anyway, we're three gittin' bizzays into this new rule, and so far he's not complaining.
me either!
xoxo,
claire
uh-oh! what's an android girl like bitsy to do when her she's-sure-he's-real-and-hopes-he'll-be-her-boyfriend coffee date, cord, comes face-to-face with her awkward-but-good-hearted-and-she-impulsively-invited-him-to-dinner-to-make-up-for-making-him-late-on-a-deadline co-worker, gigory?
obviously, she's got to angst over accidentally summoning gigory out of the coffee-shop line when she waved to get cord's attention and then gigory swept in to save her from disaster when she almost toppled a potted fern. and then she's got to angst over how to introduce these two guys that she's standing between while they're both asking if she's all right.
and then she's got to spook herself by almost ending her introduction of the two of them with the revelation that cord is real (she thinks). but she catches herself, and now there's a handshake offer from cord to gigory, followed by said handshake, followed by gigory trying to excuse himself to get back in line only to realize the line is now a ton longer and he won't have time to make it through for his coffee if he's going to get to the office early enough to make up for the deadline-miss that bitsy flubbed for him.
eureka! bitsy has a two-for-one moment of brilliant inspiration and offers gigory her coffee to make up for the report disaster and for him saving her from the fern disaster. but ...
disaster. gigory is surprised she's offering him coffee, since he thought she hated coffee, and he says that out loud.
now cord knows bitsy's a coffee aficio-fraud-o.
can i just say how happy it makes me that bitsy notices cord shift his view from gigory to her as soon as gigory reveals her deception, and bitsy is too petrified to look and see what cord's expression is?
now she's feebly claiming not to hate coffee, just that you have to put enough cream and sugar in it ... meanwhile, mentally begging gigory to just take the coffee. when he does, at last, she turns to cord (who's putting away his phone again) and tries to make an excuse about gigory seeing her waving and cord and thinking she was waving at him --
and cord basically calls her bluff, speculating that she's got a crushroutine running on him. leading straight to ...
worldbuilding!
okay, so this is pretty slick of me. bitsy says surely the dream feed would have taken care of a crushroutine, to which cord says, "the dream feed's not perfect."
shock!
she defends the dream feed's reliability. it's supposed to be 100% -- assuming you round up from the two-thousandth digit after the decimal place. cord responds that reliable and perfect aren't the same thing.
more bitsy mooncalfing! gigory's reliable, you're perfect.
but now the plot thickens, as cord reveals the secret that he's in dream feed management, which she's surprised to learn is even a thing.
cord goes into a worldbuilding, worldbuilding, worldbuilding explanation of how the dream feed might let a few dozen crushroutines slip through in a day, and those might end up creating a feedback loop the next day, and when you multiply this out by millions of androids existing for hundreds of years since the system was set up, it becomes statistically unavoidable that once a decade you'd get a "magnitude six" amplification and once a century, a "magnitude eight."
bitsy doesn't know what that means, so cord tells her: the android equivalent of old-style human "sociopathic or even psychopathic behaviors." and from there, he segues through an admission that he wouldn't normally reveal this sort of thing, but because he likes her (hooray!) and because he just found out he has to leave on the next train (what?!?), he's giving her the background to assure her he's not leaving because he's blowing her off.
so after a couple of shorties, this was a real-deal chapter. i mean, not like a real book's real-deal chapters, but a lot more of a real chapter than some of my earlier two-paragraph ones. worldbuilding out the wazoo! relationship progress! possible romantic triangle tension developing? (not that it looks much like bitsy would ever have an interest in boring gigory over real cord or anything.)
it really makes me feel like i should jump right into writing more once i review these last couple of chapters!
xoxo,
claire
right to it!
more misadventures with this artificial potted fern. she tries to hide behind it, realizes all she's doing is keeping cord from seeing her when gigory already has, then tries to push some fern fronds out of her way to get cord's attention -- which works, but tips the whole potted plant away from her and into some androids at the neighboring table.
i don't know if i'd call this the most original physical-comedy-of-errors bit i've ever read, but it's pretty funny, and then gigory comes to her rescue, tipping the plant back upright and kindly checking on the neighbordroids who squawked at the sudden fronding they'd been dealt.
and ... end scene right after both cord and gigory ask bitsy if she's okay.
even shorter than the last chapter!
holy moley, i'm starting to remember how short this book is. i mean, yeah, i was aware i worked on it for several years ...
uh-oh, now i'm clicking on links to see how many years ... ugh, even more uh-oh, now i've found out: eight! eight years! and as long as we're counting, actually, eight and a half! wow, i'm bad at this.
it's kind of coming back to me now that after eight (and a half) years and 11 chapters, i never even got to 10,000 words. msg has probably written close to that much in a day when he's really on a tear. how does he do it?!? (so obviously, i know how he does it, i've been living with the dude for going on 18 years. he just sits down and writes. and when you sit down and write every day, or most days, or at least a couple of days every week or two, it adds up. and the more used to doing it you get, the easier it is to cram in a lot of words even in just a couple of hours.)
three more chapters to review, folks. then i have to face the music and decide if i'm gonna push myself to keep doing this or throw in the towel.
on the plus side, i am actually enjoying this reviewing bit!
xoxo,
claire
i was doing so good keeping up with this most every day! i swear it was just going to be a day or two i was skipping out of laziness. aaaannnd, here we are two weeks later. okay, let's go then!
they're at the coffee place and bitsy's just spotted gigory. oh no!
so obviously right away she's telling herself it's no big deal and then just as right away, she's jumping to a horrific scenario in which gigory for some reason comes over to say hello and ends up giving up the goods on the fact that bitsy invited him to dinner sometime.
so she takes cover at a nearby table behind a big plastic potted fern. she keeps going through these hilarious Y/N decision trees the whole time and ends up sitting in the worse of the two chairs at the table -- the one with the fern looming right over it where its fronds accost her hair.
let me tell you, this poor girl's absurd desperation really tickles me.
now it's the worse-getting-worse department, because when she looks over at cord, he's texting on his phone, obviously perturbed by whatever is interrupting his coffee mixing. and of course that prompts her to wave to get his attention, hoping to distract him from the phone -- and instead of cord, the wave attracts gigory.
wait, that's the end of the chapter?! i guess this was in one of the stages where i swore i'd just write however much i had time and energy for, not push myself to finish a "real" chapter (like any of these chapters has been as long as one in an actual book).
fun chapter! and short!
which ... makes it even worse that i didn't sit my butt down a week and a half ago and review it then.
all right, i've learned my lesson!
more tomorrow ... then only three more chapters after that before i have to start writing new ones ... eep!
xoxo,
claire
