sandrakwilliams.net

Breaking News Alert: Crowd favorite becomes first beagle to win at Westminster dog show Barking and baying up a storm, Uno lived up to his name Tuesday night by becoming the first beagle to win best in show at the Westminster Kennel Club.

Huh? The things the Bee considers important . . .

I signed up for the Sacramento Bee’s Breaking News Alerts.

What an amazing service. They send me junk like “Spears loses visitation rights” and yet don’t think the assassination of Benazir Bhutto deserves an alert.

Truly amazing.

In my morning’s reading:

• Parents plan to use their dead son’s sperm to have a woman inseminated.

• A 66-year-old woman, artificially inseminated, gives birth. According to the article I read, after her mother died she was lonely and decided to have a child.

It seems like there are much better ways of dealing with grief.

Not Sandy, not Sharon, not Sarah. Sandra.

Or your first, at least, isn’t.

I finished the first draft of a major chapter, one that tied up a situation that had been brewing since the middle of the first book (this is the middle book). Reboot. Start over.

Those of you who are first readers, I strongly suggest you do not, after reading draft work and providing little or no positive comment, say, “That was well-written!” when the above-referenced writer reads you a fight scene from a mediocre published book (especially when the fighters, who could have been quite reasonably presumed to be dead, are magically healed in the next chapter).

You may go “Wow!” if China Miéville wrote the scene. His dead remain dead. If they do come back, you will probably wish they hadn’t.

Edited so the first sentence makes sense. (It had read “Or your first, at least.”)