So I've been writing again, lately.

The bad news is that I'm not writing anything new. I'm re-doing a piece that KT and I did several years ago, with an eye to polishing it up and finishing it.

But I'm calling it writing instead of editing because the part I started with is being completely rewritten. It's meant to read as if it was a personal diary, and it just didn't have that feel, for me, so I'm trying to see if I can get it there without losing the character's "voice".

The cool part is that it's a fun challenge - the character is writing in a language that he speaks fairly well, but is only now learning how to read. He's going from a character-based system (e.g., kanji) to an alphabet-based one, which has to be really strange for him, and I'm trying to show it by throwing in spelling errors (but not grammatical ones, because as I said, he speaks the language well) and having them slowly disappear as he learns the rules. But at the same time, I need to have those errors not be so egregious that it's completely unreadable (which is tough, because he likes to use big words), and I have to make them be pretty much entirely gone by the time we get to the part of the chapter with the heavy action, because if the reader has to stop and figure out what he's saying, then it will ruin the flow and the mood.

So yeah, a fun challenge, and I've written somewhere over 2000 words this week, which feels really, really good.

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So my mother-in-law is coming for a visit this weekend. It's a short one -- she's flying in today and then leaving again Sunday. Despite Penny's pleading, she's staying at a hotel instead of sleeping on the air mattress. ("Grandma does not want to sleep on the floor, sweetie," I said. "It's not the floor, it's the mattress!" Penny protested.)

For the first time, I'm not completely stressed about how the house looks. We cleaned off all the detritus on the dining table last night, but otherwise the house is not too bad.

(If I needed a reason to keep doing the nightly clean-up, there it is.)