Uh oh.

I broke down and bought an MP3 player today, because Mom got one and I really like it. It's a 2G Sansa something-or-another and it's blue. (I would have gotten red, but the store didn't have red and anyway Mom has a red one. The blue is pretty, though.)

But that's not the uh-oh part, although I shouldn't be buying MP3 players on my budget. The uh-oh part comes after I charged up my Sansa, loaded it with tons of music, and went on a long and enjoyable walk around town. While I walked, I came up with a new idea for the Cinema Spec anthology--because they've rejected both my submissions, dammit--and it seems like a pretty good little story. By the time I got home, I had the whole thing worked out and sat down to write for a while before bed.

And, uh oh. Because writing the first few hundred words was like chipping gravel off a block of concrete with my fingernails. Two weeks from now I have to slam out a whole novel (or at least novella) in three days. I can't lose my flow now.

I'm worried that taking August off from writing was a bad, bad, bad idea. The only solution is to jump back in and write for the next two weeks and hope that limbers me up. But I can't write anything in-depth that might grab my imagination right before I have to focus utterly on Hilda and Justice. I predict I'll be writing a lot of flash stories in the next two weeks.