SaraEileen.com

My beige carpet, at the moment, looks like it’s been vomited on by a paper shredder. I decided to print every word I had written so far that could in some way grow up and be a long narrative. (I’m going to resist calling this thing a novel, for the moment. I don’t have an honest clue what it is, beyond a Thing.)

Then, I took these words, all 147,000-odd of them, and attacked them with scissors. Now I have lots of little strips of moments. I don’t know quite what to do with my moments, but I like them better than the pages they were before. This mess is going to force me to think about the story fluidly. I was getting stuck; I needed to shake the Thing up.

Now I have hundreds of moments. The moments are grouped into themes. Now what? Oh right. Plot.

It’s finally creeping into summer again. The screen door is open and I was sweaty and happy when I walked to work this morning. I’m glad there will be a few more warm days in my future. I think two winters back-to-back nearly killed me.

In other news: several weeks ago I was bounced the drafts of my company’s new HR policies for fine editing, checking capital letters, branding, formatting bullet point lists, etc. As we’re a start-up, all of this work is very much in flux. I edited with no troubles until I hit the Maternity leave section. Unable to resist, I left a very long comment for my HR manager in the sideline of the policy’s page, pointing out that the policy had no same-sex partnership contingencies.

This morning my HR manager presented the new policies. And to my great joy, not only has the leave been changed to “Parental,” but the policy now gives equal leave allowances to both male and female, primary and secondary carers. I think I must had looked a bit silly, sitting at the table grinning like an idiot, but seeing that change made me glow.