Well yesterday was my first eight-hour shift at the library. I’ve been really good at remembering to take Aleve for my arthritis daily for the past week, so my joints were doing just fine. My feet still hurt, however. After walking home, I looked at my phone which has a built-in pedometer and it said I’d taken over 12,000 steps. I don’t know that it registers every step very well though because it sure felt like more than that. Yesterday at work was fairly busy. The Jasper Public Library has two drop boxes: one for books and the other for videos. The one for books was full to the point of overflowing, and the one for videos was getting close. As a page (still can’t get over the silliness of the title), I pretty much just shelve books unless they need help at the front desk. So from a quarter of nine until my break at one, I shelved books, CDs, and videos. Then from one thirty to four, I shelved even more, finally catching up with all the morning’s returns plus the lunch rush hour when lots of people rushed in to drop off wet books and DVDs. From four to five, I would immediately shelve whatever got checked back in then helped to close the library. All in all, it was a pretty good day.

If any of you are paying attention (and it’s likely no one is), the word count for my novel yesterday didn’t go up. It’s not that I didn’t work on it; it’s that I was instead working on typing up the past week’s worth of notes out of my notebook as well as doing some research on-line about battlefield and wilderness first aid. Plus I made several calendars where I could start keeping better track of how many days are actually passing in each book and where I can see how events are related to each other at a glance since I made each year on one page. I’ll come up with a coloring or code system for them later. Right now, I’m happy just to have the calendars filled in with all the dates. (For those of you wondering why I don’t just grab an old X-files calendar and just use it to determine dates, it’s because Yohk [the main world in the stories so far] only has 360 days in a year, not 365/6 like Terre [er, that’s Earth in the books].) What was I talking about? Oh yeah, what I was doing yesterday with the novel. Actually, I did write up quite a bit of new content as well, but since it’s for chapters I haven’t yet reached, it hasn’t made its way into the official document.

Actually, the official document is beginning to look quite messy. I believe I explained a couple days ago about how the flahsback chapters have been rearranged once already. Well, two of them are getting flip-flopped, and one of them is still only half finished. So right now, I’ve gotten up to chapter eight completely written (though I’m thinking about adding a little to chapter eight because it’s kind of short and cut off at the end), chapter nine is half-written, chapter ten (also half-written) is going to be switched to chapter twelve which is only a quarter written in my notes, there aren’t chapters eleven or thirteen yet, and chapter fourteen is finished. Beyond that, there are some notes and jotted passages, but no complete chapters until very close to the end where the final chapter is all but finished within my notes though scattered in pieces. I often wonder what it must be like to simply write a novel from start to finish without jumping around like a grasshopper all over the place. Oh well, this system seems to be working to a degree, so I guess I’ll not mess with it.

Since I don’t work today, I think I’ll work on getting those half chapters finished plus filling out the last flashback (chapter ten) and getting it typed up too. Then I’m going to have to do some more research on hand-to-hand combat, fighting with medieval weaponry, suits of plate armor, and the architecture of large arenas. I do more research on my books lately than I do on linguistics anymore. At any rate, I’m going to type up some more notes I scribbled out last night while in bed and then get back to the novel itself. I’ve had some ideas as to how to handle my half chapters. Later!