Chronologically Challenged

I have a love-hate relationship with the whole daylight savings time/standard time thing. For the most part, I hate switching back to standard time in the fall. Even though I find it much easier to get up in the morning after we go back to standard time, I despise the fact that it gets dark at 5:00 in the afternoon. I mean, really, when do we need to "save" daylight more? Seems to me like there's plenty of it to go around in the summer! So from that perspective, standard time in fall and winter seems perverse.

But I do love the first week or two after we go back to standard time. First, obviously, there's that extra hour of sleep on the Saturday night when we "fall back". Who doesn't love that? But more importantly, it takes me a week or two to fully adapt to the time change, and so I find it easy for a little while to get up early in the morning, before the rest of the family is stirring, and get things done. Eventually, of course, I lose that edge and wind up sleeping until 6:30 or 6:45 instead of the 6:00 I'd prefer, but for this little honeymoon period, I am extra productive and I love that.

Of course, if it were up to me, I would abolish standard time altogether. When I was in high school, California actually tried this. For one full year, we had daylight savings time all the time. I liked it. My mother liked it. But a lot of people hated it. They complained that in the winter, their kids had to go to school in the dark. (My father, who hailed from Minnesota, laughed. In Minnesota, kids have to go to school in the dark in winter, even when they're on standard time.) But the experiment failed.

I think the politicians' mistake wasn't the basic idea of setting the clock to one time and keeping it there all year, though. They just chose the wrong time. My proposal for chronological sanity is that we set the clocks half an hour ahead of standard time and then just leave them there. It wouldn't be pitch black at 6:30 a.m. in the dead of winter but it also wouldn't be pitch black at 4:30 p.m.

Admit it. It's an inspired idea. But, of course, inspired ideas are nearly always doomed to failure.

Speaking of inspiration, as I mentioned yesterday, my book has reached its 400th page. And seems almost as far from finished as ever. You see, I'm too inspired. I have more story for these characters than will fit in a standard full-length romance novel. I see a 480-500 page monster looming before me. And that's after I cut/combined some of the subplots to get to the end more quickly. If I hadn't done that, I would no doubt have been looking at a 600-page behemoth!

What to do, what to do? Well, I've resolved finish the damn book as plotted and then worry about whittling it down to a respectable length. It is, after all, a first book. Given how few first manuscripts are actually published, perhaps I shouldn't even be worrying about writing a book that's of a "saleable" length, since it's not particularly likely to be saleable anyway!