stop. start. stutter.

You know how sometimes you get when you feel like there's a thousand spiders under your skin and you kind of want to claw them out? Yeah, that's about how I feel, only with words. There are a whole bunch of things I have to say in the back of my head, and they keep evaporating the minute I try to put them together.

I'm this close to putting the novel on the shelf for a while and starting in on the other one I've got quasi-plotted. The main characters of that one are guaranteed to be more cooperative. However, it's less commercially viable, which kind of sucks. I may take next week and see if it's got more juice anyway. I'm really frustrated and upset with myself for not being able to whip this manuscript into place; it's not the first time I've gotten stuck on something like this, but it's the first time I've had a self-imposed deadline, you know?

(On the other hand, I've been getting some quality knit time. I'm one baby and a wedding behind on the gift knitting, and Christmas is coming up. AUUUUUUGH MUST KNIT FASTER. Yes, my life is a series of deadline failures right now. It's not helping much.)

While I've been sulking around the house, I have hearkened back to my Web 2.0 roots and dinked around a bit with the blog sidebar, which now includes my latest-bookmarked URLs from my del.icio.us -- stuff I come across while researching, stuff I find cool, stuff that I keep using as a reference, etc -- and my "recently played" list from last.fm. I'm also trying to convince myself that I really really I-swear-to-you will start writing up reviews of everything I read on Goodreads, but I know myself well enough to know that I'm just plain old not going to. If you've got a last.fm account, though, feel free to toss me a friend request.

...yeah, I really got nothing this week.