Fortune cookie says: Reflect on yourself before anyone can look down on you.

It fit my purpose as I bit into it before leaving the house tonight and headed for the library.

I did start in the library, but ended up in the campus center. The new monstrosity eery, vacuous, and smells vaguely antiseptic. It feels like it isn't actually open yet and shouldn't be entered except by official personel. But oh, it's quiet - not a soul talking on a cell phone - and there are booths on the second floor with cushy seats and clean tables.

I am reading through my existing fiction and getting ideas about what work needs to be done, where I am, what I suck at, and where my strengths are.

Tonight I read through all 22k from my failed 2005 NaNoWriMo. It goes all over the place, but there is some connecting thread that ties it together and feels like unfolding a puzzle. I want to believe that all these jumbled pieces are telling the same story. Pieces of it are inconsistent because I changed my mind as I wrote and didn't correct previous passages yet, but this allows me to see the ideas changing. It's interesting, and some passages I really enjoy. I am not sure where it's going yet, but I have a few ideas which I'm going to try to write down tonight before I call it quits.

I can tell that I was reading a big variety of stuff when I wrote for NaNo 2005, because the internal references and vocabulary pull to mind Haworth books I edited on crop science and genetics, psychology, and even a little purple prose.

My next to-do is to dig out my short stories from the digital purgatory I left them in and print them all out. I'll read through them and get a sense of what's up. The novels are a long-term project, but a short story that mostly just needs cleaning up - or that I could complete another draft of in a weekend - will help keep my momentum rolling. Theoretically my other big project and the next best place to work would be my thesis, but I am not sure I can tackle that one yet.

I have an extra goal to throw in there:

Rescue my pre-2004 writing from Lotus Word Pro before I lose access to a computer than can support the software. I've already lost access to an already-installed and running version of it, since my dad's old computer is dead and I never reinstalled the program on mine when my computer was corrupted three years ago.

There was a long time where I hated Microsoft Word and refused to use it except in emergencies. Lotus was great, but its time is at an end. I have at least a hundred pages of material in the LWP format that I don't want to lose.