One of the joys of marriage--I got to be right today, when I thought I wouldn't be.

Chrissy wanted to leave the house and take Adia to a little petting-zoo farm out in some podunk place called Ferndale. Can you even say Ferndale without talking like the guy from King of the HIll? No, you can't. "Furndul." See? I told her we should just go for a walk in Bellingham, even though I knew there was no way it would be as cool. Still, Chrissy bore with me and took Adia down Whatcom Creek. And there we saw some Canadian geese with eleven adorable little goslings, one of the typically spectacular blue herons, and a bit old freaking beaver.

Beavers! You don't know how cool this is, unless you were raised in Mojave Asshole, California, and the only water you ever saw was the California Aquaduct, and the only native wildlife rattlesnakes. The first time I read Redwall, I had to go to our encyclopedia (sad world without the internet) and look up what badgers and beavers and otters actually looked like. (This is actually how I was able to give Sän information on wolverines the other night. Wolverines, despite being the size of hound dogs, can take down a moose! Yeah. That's one mustaelid you must-a-not mess with.)

Anyway, it seems that Whatcom Creek is actually as cool as a petting zoo.

My writing group is trying to teach me to write short stuff. In that vein, the Great Beast, the 225k novel I finished in January, is nearing its first rewrite. My goal has been to cut it to 175k. At the moment, I've gone through about five-sevenths of the books' segments and I have 142,275.

The problem is, I have 51, 928 left to go through and cut down by about half. I hold out hope--there was a lot of stuff toward the end I marked for serious surgery. But seriously, I've taken three or four chapters at a time and replaced them with one. I've chopped out entire subplots. And I even, sniff, cut some sex. This thing should be under 175k by the time I'm done. It has to be...