Ah, Chicago, I will see you soon

Without a doubt, the worst part of writing anything long is the first sentence. I've been agonizing over mine for the past... fifteen minutes? At least? (I still don't like it.) The sun is rising right outside the window here, though, so I'm kind of left wondering whether it'll be suspicious if I get up and move so I'm actually facing it. (It was suspicious that my socks don't match.)

Back to this first sentence thing, though. I think I'm thinking about it too much, because every phrase I use, I double-check it against the kind of genre it's likely to invoke. Using the phrase "men and women of The Independent" (being the temporary name of my newspaper) brings superheroes to mind too easily. Which might be fun, but isn't necessarily something I think I can sustain. And my story has nothing to do with superheroes. Spies and conspiracy and social... oddness, sure, but superheroes not so much. I do think I've solved the slight problem I was having with two of my main characters, though... by making their situation more complicated, of course. And I still figure it's okay that the one character with the most in-depth story in my mind right now won't even exist for the first few chapters, because he's a plot point as well as my token Holmes-based character (rather than being based on all of the characters based on Holmes that I tend to base characters on. It sounds better that way.)

I kind of wish I still had the British English spell-check... never thought I'd miss Word for that.

I wonder if I'm morally obligated to make Heather a Strong Female Character. To me, she's a bit of an idiot. I wonder if people will like her. I love that I get to wonder that. I can't wait until I get to start torturing characters. If I'm worried about being suspicious, though, I probably shouldn't be sitting here smirking to myself about that. Probably looks like I'm plotting something nonfictional. I also love that, two sentences in, suddenly Heather is 500% more bitter than I thought she was, and I've discovered that I undershot her age by almost five years. And suddenly she has a boss that might also be interesting. (I'm starting to fear that I'm going to have too much going on here, but at the worst my intro plot-thing can be relegated to a sort of comic relief. Which it was going to be anyway, pretty much.) Don't you love this inspecific rambling?

And, now that this entry is almost four times as long as what I've managed to write, I think I'm going to stop... because I've realized that I'm desperately, desperately in need of outlines. But at least I've got my first paragraph, and that's a lot more than I had yesterday. And I think it's a paragraph I might not go back and erase completely later. So yay! Now I just need to get my brain around using my sketch book for outlines. I wish I understood why I was so picky about using each notebook for one specific thing. Outlines are sort of like drawings. (My notebooks are the only thing I have that's organized. Well, maybe aside from my computer. But that's it.)

Whoa internets!

This almost makes up for the fact that the USB cable for my external hard drive has abandoned me. Suddenly, they've upgraded the Shoreland to 100mb service. We only got 10 before. This is so exciting. I'd written that possibility off since the dorm closes in a year. Yay, even faster internet!

... Wish I had my USB cable.

Also, I wish I knew how O'Hare manages to destroy at least one part of my suitcase every time I go through it. I didn't think my suitcase had that much to destroy, but apparently it does because I'm still picking broken black plastic out of the inside of it.

[About five minutes later, after searching in every conceivable place, including the pantry and the refrigerator]: Apparently my USB cable decided to spend winter break curled up under a blanket, wedged in between couch cushions. Which is an adorable thing for an inanimate object to do, but not when it allows me to believe that I will be facing a week or more of not being able to update my iPod.