Blustery Days and Wild Mares

The wind is whipping it up outside. What is it whipping up you ask? Dust and debris (such as flattened empty cigarette packs, sheets of long ago paid invoices, folded pages of newspapers fluttering about like insane butterflies) to which my horses are having fits about. One mare twirled wildly in her stall banging her head and scraping her face. Poor thing and stupid smoker for just tossing his empty pack of cigarettes in an unsecured trash can. Which brings me to our trash collectors, they are a group of works who want to get their dirty job done with speed and an obvious lack of efficiency; hence the wind blown garbage dance in my stable yard.

The house just rocked from a particularly violent wind blast. Spooky. A once blue sky is now gray with wind born desert dust, yuck. Not fit for man nor beast.

So that gives me the perfect excuse to stay inside to write. And write I have. My novel is perking along nicely, at least the first 20 pages or so. I can't seem to get past editing just those. I look over at the stack of neglected manuscript and then back at my computer screen and all I can do is shrug. I'll get to it, just let me tweak this one sentence...

I have been catching up on reading some of the blogs I follow and most of them this week are concentrating on the first 10 pages of submissions from writers they won't tell us the names of. So I guess my preoccupation with my first 20 pages is OK. Even my best girlfriend wants me to concentrate on my first few pages. So, I am going to follow their advice and slash and burn and swap around sentences and change adjectives and try to keep my writing from being passive... Wish me luck.