Motivated!

I started on my freelance project over the weekend. Sure, I only put a couple hundred words to paper, but I did a lot of research, reading, and prep work, so that counts for something. Tonight when I get home I hope to get a thousand words on "paper" before I finish. That might be a lofty goal for a first night -- after working all day -- but I usually start a little slowly so I can organize my thoughts a bit.

I have three hefty chapters to write and I really need to get some of this done. If I were writing fiction (from my head) this would represent about 30 hours of work, but since this writing requires a bunch of research, it's going to take a bit more time.

In other news; the weekend before last I played Runebound with SEth, Jason, Chris, and Rick. We get together every now and again to play games, but this time we had a particularly long break in between due to convention season and busy participants. We had a good time, but the game itself, while fun, left a lot to be desired. It's billed as "sort of like an improved version of Talisman," but if that's true, there's en even better game that's "like an improved version of Runebound." As it played, there wasn't a lot of interaction between players and the time in between turns was long-ish and uninvolving. I guess it left us plenty of time to talk, though, so that's good.

This last weekend we had a very nice evening out at a friend of Julia's. She's an excellent cook and she and her husband are huge wine fans, so they treated us to potatoes au gratin, broiled salmon in a white sauce, toasted bread, and creamed spinach, oh, and like three bottles of very good wine.

Saturday we ran some errands, then spent the afternoon with Julia's sister and her kids. Her older kid, Jason, has a Nintendo 64 that his dad just pulled out of storage, so he and I played a bunch of old games while the girls played with the baby, Madison, just over a year old.

Sunday I played in Jason's D&D game while Julia worked a jewelry show in Belltown. My game was short, but we all had a blast and we finished in time for me to pick up Julia and get her home for a relaxing evening.

You'll notice an update in the right-hand column of this page. It's a "badge" containing my shared news items. These are all sorts of interesting news stories or pages that I liked and decided to link to. Not everything will appeal to everyone, but if you're interested in what's interested me lately, that's the place to look.

And, well, that's about it for now. Like I said, tonight, I write!