Athena had a school assignment in which she had to make a project with exactly 100 pieces to it, and this is what she came up with: A candy island. The land is colored marshmallow, the trunk of the palm tree Rollos and the palm leafs sectioned candy fruit wedges. All on a shoebox ocean. I thought it was pretty clever, myself, especially the part about using Rollos for the trunk. My only concern is that one of her classmates might eat it before the teacher sees it. These are the risks you take in the rough-and-tumble world of second grade school projects.

For those of you who find the pace of National Novel Writing Month a little too leisurely, Gabe Chouinard has got your number:

I’d like you to join me, therefore, in the first annual urban drift Novel(la) in a Weekend challenge, if you dare. It will run from (your) Friday afternoon (February 2) until Monday morning (February 5) (I’m here on CST). The rules are simple: dedicate the entire weekend to churning out a Moorcock-esque short novel. Post excerpts of your progress on the forum. Or, just hang out and encourage the participants.

In sum, Gabe’s hoping to get a bunch of people to crank out, oh, 12,000 words a day for three days. You know, for fun. You could be one of them.

For the record, I’ve actually done something close to this when I was wrapping up The Android’s Dream; I wrote about a novella’s worth of text on that book in the last three days. Will I be doing it this weekend? Well, I don’t know about that. I am writing the followup to TAD at the moment; at the very least, I will also be writing this weekend.

If you want in, follow the links and pester Gabe about it. And then stock up on the caffeine.

Yesterday while Krissy was heading to work, a deer bolted out into the road and struck her car. As anyone who has ever had a vehicular encounter with a deer will tell you, this is usually a fine recipe for totaling your car. Due to Krissy’s good reactions and smart driving skills, however, her car got through the incident with a dented passenger side door and that’s about it. She’s fine, the car’s mostly fine, and the passenger side door still latches securely. As far as hitting a large mammal with your car goes, that’s about as good as it gets.