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Tuesday, July 27th, 2004 04:49 pm
Also spent a big chunk of the afternoon waiting for my daughter's wrist x-ray. She has chronic arm pain -- or I should say recurring -- and I'm damned if she's going to end up impaired in the hands. Not while she has a mother. They wouldn't let us make an appointment, I don't know why, which meant that we had to sit around for an hour with unsuitable magazines (I know, I could have taken _Beginning Operations_, the first Sector General Omnibus, but I can be an idiot)

I ended up reading the September 2003 issue of San Francisco magazine. It was actually fascinating. It was for upper middle class people who had lost their high-rolling dot.com jobs, or who were in danger of losing their high-rolling dot.com jobs, or who hated their high-rolling dot.com jobs, or who felt guilty about making twenty times as much as their best friends from college, or were getting discriminated against because they're old. Such a morass of well-heeled anxiety. Makes me feel -- I don't know -- smug? for having been merely poor for so long.

In order to stop doing the arithmetic over and over, because I have a morbid fascination with numbers but I also can't bear them in mind for long, here's my running count:

Chapter 1 2150
Chapter 2 3070
CHapter 3 2588
Chapter 4 2707
Chapter 5 2412
Chapter 6 3213
Chapter 7 3008
Chapter 8 2572
Chapter 9 3361
Chapter 10 2778
so far -- 27859

According to my compromise formula (375 words per page) that's almost 75 pages.

Problem is I think I'm more than a third of the way through the story I have to tell. But I think at this stage I always think "oh hell, I've got a novella on my hands, not a novel," and a few months down the line I'm thinking "oh hell, I've got an encyclopedia on my hands."

We'll see.