Sherri Cornelius

• My step-daughter graduates high school this evening. I decided to stay home, after much anguish and stress, because of the extreme probability of massive fragrance exposure. Me, fragranced out, wrangling three kids in a packed gymnasium for 3+ hours…I finally admitted it just wasn’t going to work. I’ve already been exposed so much this week that it’s built up and my tolerance would be nil if I were to go tonight. I bought her a special gift to show I care since I can’t be there, and I’ll write a letter telling her how proud I am.
• I finished updating the synopsis for Black Veil Angel, and now I’m waiting for my beta readers to get back with me before I start the final polish on that. During the lull I’ll crit Allie’s vampire mailman novel. I expect to have it done over the weekend.
• I’ve lost ten pounds now. It’s slow, but I’m settling into healthier eating patterns.
• Lots of cosmic activity going on in my external world, with things breaking and tornadoes and enlightening coincidences. Sometimes when these turbulent times pass I come out with a deeper knowledge of myself…and sometimes I just feel like I’ve been beaten. Too soon to tell which will be the case here.
• This is the kids’ last day of school.
• Sunday is the finale of Lost. ZOMG LOST

I have a little fragrance hangover. Yesterday was my daughter’s Thanksgiving lunch at school, and I actually did quite well. Felt fine (as fine as I ever do) while I was there and into the evening. The eyesight started to get a little iffy around nine, and I went to bed soon after. Woke up this morning with bad eyes, but let me tell you, I am grateful for these bad eyes. You know why? Because last year at this time I was just starting The Time of the Migraine, a good two months in which I had constant blurry vision and any whiff of fragrance brought forth the headache. And the year before that, I had bronchitis or pneumonia or something along with a bad back but was unable to go to the doctor, so both lasted for months. I can handle a little fragrance hangover.

This fragrance thing is actually getting more manageable. I think I’m healing, as the reactions for the past several months haven’t been as strong. Trips to the store are less taxing. I can think while at a school function. It’s tempting to start letting my guard down, but I know this is a slow process. I have to let my body heal.

Finally seeing the end of this editing project. It’s the first novel I’ve edited, been editing shorts, so it seemed to go forever. I’m at the point now where I know what it’s like to be an editor, and I need to balance it against my own writing. Do I like editing enough to put my book on hold for three weeks? Not sure about that. I’d planned to get BVA done by Christmas, something I could have done if my editing assignment had been another short. I had no idea how much time a novel would take.

Gotta get bananas for Maggie’s class . Thanks for everybody’s good wishes about her arm, it’s not bothering her too much, with the brace.

So…that’s me today. What’s up with you?

I’ve been feeling pretty crappy the past few days, and apprently it’s that time of year, because my bud Fal has felt the same way, and she’s way up there in Illinois. I’m on the upswing, though, and I hope she is, too.

I love September. The word is nice, the birthstone is sapphire, the weather is cooler, the kids are firmly in school, football starts…There’s nothing to dislike about September. Well, we do have FOUR family birthdays in September–mine, my husband’s, my son’s, and my step-son’s–on top of the back-to-school expense, auto insurance is due and Christmas is just around the corner…So yeah, financially it’s usually pretty stressful in September. I haven’t had a birthday present in years. If I had the money I’d probably have to buy my present myself, anyway.

But still…September is nice. Energizing. Full of possibility.

I think I’m going to try a technique with my novel that I used for the long synopsis. For the synopsis, I wrote and typed everything out, then I cut apart the scenes and rearranged them into the best order. It’s one of those things I’ve tried before according to someone else’s instructions with no success, but once I threw out my internal rule book and played it by ear, it worked out well. With the novel I’ve tried notecards, but writing a hundred notecards and deciding which information is important enough to go on each notecard was just too unwieldy, so I decided I wasn’t an organizer after all. But again, I had fallen into the trap lots of writers fall into–the “should” trap, the “rules” trap, the “everybody knows better than I do” trap.

So I’m going to make up this technique as I go along. I’ll print out the whole book–backstory, current scenes, deleted scenes–and staple together the pages of each scene, cutting the page with scissors if necessary to separate them. After that…I don’t know. We’ll see. I hesitate to tell you exactly what I do, because I don’t want to perpetuate that “rules” mentality. Art doesn’t follow rules.