Crazy Week!

"Mar 23 - $1250 / 3br - Brand New Beautifull House, Never Lived Before - (Las Vegas)"

Amazing what words you really can't leave out of an ad. Who knew that "in" made such a difference!

This has been an interesting week.

I got a rejection from an agent. It was a nice rejection, "with regrets", but said the main character isn't compelling enough. Here we go again with compelling! That's okay, I guess. Based on the comments from another semi-rejections I got, I've rewritten the whole book again. I just have to do the last hundred pages and we've got draft 62,543. Just kidding. But how many times have I said it was done? Following the suggestions from the agent, the book has now dropped below 90,000 words. Normal novel length. Go figure. It went from 214,000 words at its longest down to 87,000 (right now. I have to rewrite those last hundred pages still, so I don't know how long it will end up--under 100,000 words, though, for sure).

Daniel had developed some kind of horrid allergies that act like hay fever but come with a rash that acts like eczema. So we're up all night with itching and stuffiness.

I punctured my little finger with a fork trying to cut fudge that I made accidentally. Now that I write it, it seems completely unlikely that the situation would exist, much less that you could actually puncture a pinkie finger with TWO tines of the fork. I guess I have excellent bad aim. Oh, and it hurt. And yes, I did make fudge by accident.

I spent lots of time driving around and found a LOT of places we don't want to live. Most of Las Vegas seems to be unsafe, crowded, or master-planned. I read that Vegas and San Francisco are in similar housing trouble: unwise borrowing lead to foreclosures, which lowered the overall value of all the houses, and that lead to more foreclosures (apparently people don't like to pay for or sell houses that are worth less than the mortgage is for, so they walk away). To prevent future foreclosures, lenders stopped being so generous about who could get loans, so suddenly there were too few buyers, and that drove the overall house values down even more, exacerbating the problems. There are now many many more houses than people who can buy, so the values continue to drop and will for at least the rest of the year, despite the promises by those master-planners who insist that houses still gain 10% in value per year and are still building new houses! The result of all of this is there are some great houses on the market for cheaper than rent, but nobody can get loans to buy them so the rental market is awful. And you can't convince the owners to carry the loan or rent-to-own with you because the houses are owned by the banks, who just want to unload them--onto someone who can get a loan.

I, unfortunately, right now fall into the category of people who can't get a loan (gotta sell that old house first!), and I also can't find a suitable rental. What's a woman to do?

What with holidays, visitors coming, cleaning girl not making it twice this week, and the regular stresses of life, it's been a rather unpleasant week, despite really nice visits from my parents.

One last random thought: Why is it that the two holidays that are supposed to be Christ-centered are the ones that we celebrate by telling children they are being visited by mythical beings who give them things? Nobody really waits for the Great Pumpkin on Halloween or Thanksgiving, but we have very clearly associated Christ with magical creatures that, oh--sorry--don't really exist! And why the emphasis on stuff and wanting stuff? All of that is very anti-Christ.