Rainy day in Seattle

Drizzle and light showers, nothing much...but I have to be careful. I think the guy sitting next to me on the plane from Chicago to here was sick and I'm trying hard not to catch it. Lots of hot tea.

Hopped the lite rail from the airport to downtown, then hopped the monorail to get to the hotel, which was five blocks from the Sci-Fi museum...which has an exhibit of "Battlestar Galactica" going on. I may check into that.

I had a fantastic veggie burger at a joint called McMenamin's, corner of 3rd and Roy. They made it themselves with some of their home-brewed ale. That and one of their own stouts and I was in hog heaven.

I worked on BC-3 while flying and need to go over what I did, I'm sure. But it's getting there. I'll be ready to send it in by the time I get back to Buffalo.

I'm chattering, I know. This is the crap people send via Twitter. But I'm feeling a bit tender, at the moment, and not in a good way...more like after you've been punched and the bruise is just beginning to build. You see, I had a rather sudden hard-edged conversation with Brendan about my lack of self-confidence in writing "Place of Safety" and it was all due to an article I read in "Writer's Digest." About genre writing and how it gets dissed by MFA programs in literature. And I don't know why that article got to me, but it started on this road to questioning my writing skills and realizing just how much hesitation and doubt was instilled in me by my mother as I was growing up, none if it intentional but just as damaging, which led me to see how I've spent my life working for other people and not for myself, really, because I don't think I'm worth the effort...which brought me back to wondering if I really can do justice to POS.

I've written four stories spread over what will soon be seven books, all of them really genre pieces. Erotic suspense thrillers, for the most part, with "Bobby Carapisi" this odd hybrid of erotica and tragedy and drama. POS is a straightforward novel, more mainstream in many ways with with aspirations of literature. Yet here I am, this servant of a personality who'll fight like a madman for someone I work for but won't do jack shit for himself, thinking I can make it work. Thinking I can get it published if I DO get it to work.

And Brendan's response? "Nobody else is doing it. Nobody else would let me be true to myself. They'd make me some idiot or an innocent or something one-note...and you won't. So I'm stuck with you and you with me. Get over it. I have."

Maybe tomorrow I will. Right now, I'm still tender.