Re-prioritizing my to-do list

Dear family, friends and various readers in China and the Ukraine who Google stats say are loyal followers (I only wish I knew how you ended up on my speck of sand in the world wide web, but alack, all of the referring sites are in Cyrillic.), I am not on a celebrity cruise, nor have I been kidnapped by squirrels or severely dismembered by my overly excitable dog during yet another ill-conceived walk through my neighborhood.

The outline: Here it is in all of it's better-late-than-never,
non-sensical, incomplete and indecipherable glory.

For the past two and a half years I've tried to blog weekly about whatever was on my mind (i.e.: whatever annoying thing the dog had done recently) as a way to keep my writing skills sharp and air out my musty brain. In the process of blog maintenance, however, I've neglected my other inside voices -- those characters in my novel that I'm perpetually whining about yet secretly miss every day. Their voices have been louder lately -- as have those of various friends who keep insisting (and rightfully so) that I just finish the damn thing already and move on with my life. 

So I'm doing that. Like for real this time, I'm doing that.

I dusted off my 'ol novel outline. Typed it up. Revised it. Highlighted unfinished parts. And now I'm going to go back and finish them.

So I'm going to neglect the blog instead of neglecting the manuscript. Which should've been the plan all along, but you know, we humans are easily distracted. 

I'm hoping future updates will detail progress and the resulting thrill of progress. In the meantime, I'll keep on typing on. Or something like that. Catch you at the end. (Well, that's not precisely true, I've already written the end. So I suppose I'll catch you in the middle somewhere … but who knows, maybe the end will change. Life and noveling is funny like that.)