I got a lot done yesterday, almost none of it from my to-do list. Some short fiction revisions, some market submittals — I haven’t put anything out to market on spec submission since sometime last May, and this will be my least active year for short fiction in a very long time — then a bunch of time cleaning up my tracking spreadsheet and my actual story files. Which definitely counts as deep maintenance, and also writing avoidance for the book outline I’m trolling with right now.

Or possibly it’s a sign of the long-awaited chemo-induced attenuation of my writing brain, exeunt pursued by bears. Certainly most of my activity yesterday was left brainy stuff, and none of it was oriented toward laying down new words.

At any rate, today is an open schedule. I expect to be helping the_child with some of her homework, and a family burger outing is in the offing around midday, but otherwise my time is uncommitted. I’m going to poke at the outline and see if the brain is in gear. I also want to draft a blog post about how it feels not to have a novel to be written under contract for the first time in five years, and maybe some related thoughts on Sunspin.

The to-do list, cleaned up, mostly for my own reference. As usual, in no particular order.

• Revise a committed short story (finished this past week, now out with first readers)
• Send out the linked lost colony stories to market
• Draft a script on metastasis for a science podcast
• Participate in a podcast interview
• Make yet further notes on a proposal/outline for a mooted collaborative novel project with urban fantasy author J.A. Pitts
• Review Sunspin feedback from several of my readers
• Begin process a book proposal regarding my cancer blogging (index built)
• Revisit Antarctica project
• Some creative/academic critique for a friend (follow up as needed)