This weekend was rather rough. For starters, I'm still sick which makes everything "extra special". EDM and Fluffy are also sick in various degrees, but while she just gets slightly cranky, he gets rather monstrous. I think I raised my voice once even.

Fluffy had family coming over, which meant I got to clean. Ended up taking about three or so hours but now I have a working home theater (only two speakers and a 1.7 meter screen). And a cleaned-off pool table.

The nice part was that I got a four hour block after all that work to play around. And... that is where things went wrong. In the previous week, I wrote a Perl-based build system because I was having a bit of trouble with building the chapter files automatically for a novel (so I say build the top-level book and it figures out that it also needs to build the 30+ chapters). Make didn't quite work out and I looked at a number of build systems, but none of them were really dynamic enough. That found, I spent a good hunk of my weekend working on a functional build system that figures out targets as it goes. It works, though I really need to stop re-inventing the wheel.

I also struggled a bit with my serial. I didn't have to, mainly because I'm two weeks ahead, but I wanted to keep up. Between the drug haze and distractions, it took me two days to get the chapter done but I'm pretty happy with it. It is one of those difficult-to-get-into chapters so the time is "well-spent"?

I like that the comments on the serial are "you should get this published" and "it is like a professional writer!" Heh. Nice feeling, but the egoboos are appreciated.

Finally, started working a bit on FOTS. I should be getting a response back in a few months and I want to finish up the last edit. I have a lot of irons in the fire right now, but I can't seem to focus enough to knock them off. But, I offered to submit something in two weeks, so I need to get the chapter edit on deck so it is ready.

Two people said that they would have dropped FOTS in the first chapter. I know that I've had a dozen people read it, but I also know that at least two others struggled with the first third of the novel. It's part of my style, but I also want to see if I can somehow improve that. It is rough, mainly because I really have no clue what I'm doing.