Happy Wholidays!

Hello all and I hope your holidays were wonderful! Christmas day, I went sledding with my brothers for the first time in over a decade, watched my 2 year old nephew get run over by a sled, and locked my oldest brother out of the house. He came home at 2:30 am and was unable to enter the house due to having forgotten his keys, so he ended up sleeping inside the cab of his pickup inside the garage. Luckily, I had a sleeping bag inside the garage and he's a Marine, so he survived!

On the writing fronts, I don't think I will meet my deadline of having Draft 2 completed by the end of the month. Currently, I am editing Chapter 20 and with 11 more to go, the deadline will not be reached. However, I am making some great changes and cutting out an abundance of superfluous stuff that does not need to make an appearance in the final draft. Chapter 20 sees the Horizon entering the Crimean for the first time, and I am dropping her right into the action: she is with the aether flyer Horus and both airships are bringing a load of Enfield Pattern 1853 musket-rifles to the front lines. Due to the happy juxtaposition of history and authorial omnipotence, the two ships are flying directly into the September 19th siege of Sevastopol and have to make a tricky drop while guns and cannons are blazing around them.

Currently pages 164-165 have enormous scribbles and skulls all over them, which I take to mean that this particular section should be taken out and mercifully put out of its misery. Reading over it, I see why. Thankfully Draft 2 will be nowhere near the 170,000+ words that Draft 1 clocked in at, and I am excited to see what the final word count will be.

Tuesday, I had the pleasure of sitting down with some friends to watch the Christmas special of Dr. Who and am now fixated on replicating Clare's dress.

The dress has a gorgeous gathered bustle in the back, and Clare wears it with such elegance and splendor. When she first appeared on screen wearing this dress, all of us burst into rapturous coos of admiration. This would be a spectacular dress to steampunk - I see so many possibilities. However, I am so enraptured with River Song's character that I do not know if I could ever cosplay a different Dr. Who costume!