Writhe-a-thon… it was a typo, but an accurate one considering how I felt today. I seem to have been food poisoned on Wednesday night. Something’s been messing with my system, making me feel cold when it’s hot, hot when it’s cold, making me sleep most of the day, making me feel dizzy and weak, and, of all things, making me pee a lot. (And no, it’s not diabetes.)

We have a theory that it was either the food I picked up on the way home last night — Lime had a hankering for something she used to have when whe worked at the hospital I was at yesterday — or else from the ice cream bar I had last night, which may have melted and refrozen before I bought it.

In any case, I felt like hell for a lot of the day and most of the evening, but suddenly felt better about 2:00am. Too late to go for a long walk, unfortunately, but not too late to get some more writing done. Anyway, here are my stats for Thursday:

“A Killing in Burma�?: 2,618 words
Weekly Total: 13,379 words
Write-a-thon Total: 92,619 words

Those of you impressed with this, hahaha, Herculean effort — I did have a partially collapsed lung and food poisoning and lots of bad asthma and stuff while doing all this — should consider dropping by and donating a few bucks to the Write-a-Thon. I’ll be popping by and sending my sponsorships to friends on Friday, I think.

Strangely enough, “A Killing in Burma” is still mostly unfolding at the moment. At 10,297 words, this is a little scary: it feels like things are just about poised for the collision that causes life in Mandalay to undergo a significant change for just enough people for the new anti-tech Neo-Khmer Imperial overlords to be annoyed, and for anarcho-libertarians and profiteering outsiders to be struggling for a way to drive out the Khmer and let this weird little aberration bloom and spread… like kudzu, naturally.

What’s really scary to me is my suspicion that this story probably wants to be 30,000 words long,. Maybe 25,000, which means at least another week of work, maybe more. That’s the scope it’s starting to feel like now, and if you know anything, you know that there’s no almost market for anything of that length. Ah well… I’m going to keep drafting till Sunday and see where it takes me. I do need a break, and I have only two weeks left before I leave for Japan and need to get some serious lazing around in before then… as well as get a poetry-readings package planned, argh!

I have a feeling there’s going to be lots I can cut if I want to diminish the wordcount, but I need to fill out the story and the world it’s happening in, thicken the gravy so to speak, before I start worrying about cutting it to a specific length. In any case, it might be more tha a few days before I finish drafting this. In any case, I’ll almost certainly be completely finished with Write-a-thon quotas by tomorrow this time, but I think I may just try to keep writing until this story is actually finished. It’s that obsessive quality of mine, y’know. We’ll see, but I feel like there’s a certain energy in play right now that, if I abandon it, might be impossible to recapture later. I don’t always trust that feeling — there’s a few trunk stories I’ve felt that way about, while drafting, but which I’ve never been able to edit into decent shape.

Ah well. I know where the story picks up tomorrow, so that’s a booster.