Go West, Young Man!

Sitting in Flint Airport waiting for the puddle jumper that's going to take me up, and then immediately down again into Detroit for my next plane that will take me into Los Angeles. Constantly amused by the fact that it's cheaper to fly from Flint to Detroit and then to LA than it is to just fly direct to LA. Proof of the arbitrary nature of flight tickets, I suppose. At the very least the wi-fi here is free. I'm not sure if that's true everywhere now, or what.

I'm spending two weeks (roughly) out in Los Angeles to job hunt, explore, and generally recharge the battery for the last 40 odd days of school that'll be left when I return. There's talks of a trip down to Mexico for margaritas, hiking in the hills around West Hollywood, and probably more than one visit to Santa Monica.

I've been trying to get the brain to focus to get the novel rewrites done by the start of March, but unless I suddenly pull another couple of days out of thin air, it's not going to happen. I'm just starting to rework chapter 4, and I haven't touched that since at least a week ago. Chapter three is one of the more violent and emotionally charged chapters. It's sort of the breaking point where readers are either going to say "Edmund, you're one sick sonuvabitch," and they're going to stop reading because he's wrong, or they're going to say, "I feel so sorry for Edmund, but what he's doing is still deplorable," and then they'll throw their lot in for the rest of the novel. God knows I'm hoping for the latter...

We had a writing group on Sunday, and instead of working on one of the multitudes of half-cocked ideas I have sitting around in notebooks or on hard drives, or floating around my brainpan, I instead started with something new. Something about the underground beneath Chicago. Maybe a war between the topsiders and the underground. Something. I'm not entirely sure what yet, but I'm enjoying the vibrancy of the new idea a bunch right now.

My bag is an inch or so bigger than the carryon cutoff. I'm hoping it doesn't cause an issue, because I'd rather not have to deal with checking my bag and having to wait for it, and worry about whether or not it's actually going to make it to LA anyways. Here's hoping, eh?

PS:
Hilariously appropriate Sleep Talkin' Man sound for the flight
http://sleeptalkinman.blogspot.com/2010/02/feb-24-2010.html