The Web of Fall

The furnace has been kicking on in the mornings.

There's a bite in the shadows and a chill to the rain.

The sunlight has a sharper slant than it did a month ago.

The downtown trees are brushed with crimson, and the green of the hills is shading towards gold.

The spiders are spinning their webs.

Yep, it's fall again.

The last month has been fairly uneventful, hence the lull in posting. Mostly, we've been going through our storage sheds for the first time in too many years, getting rid of stuff we no longer need. So far, we've sent over 20 sacks to donation and more than that to the dump. (These are garbage-bag size sacks, not grocery-store size sacks.) It feels good to lighten the load a little, even though we have barely begun to scrape the surface of decades worth of accumulation.

I finished Draft 2 of last year's NaNoWriMo monstrosity, and I already know it'll need more tweaking for Draft 3 before the kinks in logic, character development, and plot continuity are sufficiently ironed out.  I've decided to let it marinate on the back burner for a while, and called up one of my unfinished stories to take its place. So far, I'm mostly skimming my backstories and chapters, getting my brain back into the feel of the universe. This time, I'm finishing a draft... and, fingers crossed, it'll be a draft worth chucking in the mail. Might have to take a break for NaNoWriMo 2010, but that's a month away; if I get my tail in gear, I can get the bones of the tale hammered out sufficiently before then.

Don't laugh... it could happen...

At work, the local library system is switching over to a new computer program to control everything. Because this switch knocks out the brains of the sorting system while it sets itself up, I had a day off today. My sister, my mother, and I took advantage of the sunshine to head up to a nearby trailhead (where the above web was photographed.) Then we grabbed lunch and ate at the lake, watching parasailers launch and land on the beach. (They were towed with a boat to get altitude; not sure if that would be easier or harder than jumping off a mountain, but danged if it doesn't look fun...) All in all, it was a pleasant day.

Well, I suppose that's about all that's worth updating. The blog looked a little lonely, so I figured I'd post to keep it company.