If you had asked me if members of Congress were exempt from insider trading before today, I would have said yes, of course. I would have argued that, with the kinds of information that our congressmen and -woman are privy to, they especially should not be allowed to use non-public information to trade stock for financial gain. Knowing when to buy or sell a stock when a company is about to have a contract terminated, or is about to come under congressional investigation, for example, is…

NaNoWriMo is over. I failed to win. I failed, but there are lessons in failure.

I wrote this in the middle of the night as news of the raid on the #occulyla camp was breaking on twitter, half asleep but compelled to get some of my thoughts written down before I fell asleep:

I feel like I’ve been at a near standstill the last four days. With one zero day among them, I’ve barely scratched a thousand words among them. To make up for the shortfall, I need to write roughly 2,400 words/day though the rest of the month in order to hit the Nano goal of 50k. I’ve hit that number once this month.

I found my stride yesterday, sixteen days in. I didn’t strictly follow end of day guidelines for Nano, calling it a day somewhere close to 1AM. I drafted a scene and a part of the next and it’s the best writing I’ve done all month. It’s what all others will be held up and compared to, and mocked mercilessly when they fall short.