Critiques Piling UP -- and I'm Playing with This?

Trivia:  Got back from the farmers' market.  [The old man's accumulating squash for the winter.  I buy kettle corn for breakfast.]  Anyway I cooked posole for dinner.  The aroma of the house as I came in the door was heavenly.  Much better than fried fish.

Another nice thing about farmers' markets:  You meet people you know but don't normally see.  Discovered a friend had an apricot poodle I didn't know about.  [It went crazy over the cat smell all over my clothes.]


Comment:  I had a sneaky suspicion that I was spending more money than usual.  When I checked, I was.  Things like going out to restaurants and buying books.  No big deal because we have the money.  It's just out of character.  

Then I noticed where the money was going.  To mom-&-pop places that I would like to see survive the recession.  The US of A must be in bad shape when your spending turns into charity.

If so many people weren't getting caught in the middle, I'd be laughing at the corporate-America mind-set/ethos.  They shipped hundreds of thousands of jobs overseas to improve their bottom line and increase executive pay, then expected the public to keep buying.  I rest my case for the intelligence of corporate group-think.

Reading:  Am well into the fifth book of Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson series -- The End of the Olympians [I think.  I'm not going down stairs to look it up.].  I'll finish it because I think it's a good case study in stringing action scenes together, even though I find them rather repetitive.    I also find it rather shallow in its characterization.  I can't quite excuse that away by saying the story is told from an adolescent male's viewpoint. 

Also bought a Barbara Hambly book about vampires.  I don't read about vampires, but there you are.  I'm a fan of hers, but I like the Ben January mysteries best.  [This was one of charity purchases.  I need another book ... like five pounds on my hips.]

Writing:  Am thinking my writing is a disaster at the moment.  I've got this short story which became the basis of my novel manuscript -- There Be Demons, and have been submitting it.  Rejections have come in regularly, some with nice personal comments.  I decided to look at it before I sent it out again.  Before I had chopped it down to 2700 words.  Now the story is 2300 words

Now I got to go back to the chapters I have to critique.  I recommend critiquing, beta reading, or whatever you want to call it.  I've learned a lot about revising and editing.  More important, I have a better idea about my bad habits from my critiquers.  Thanks all.

Progress:  Not much.  See comments about Night for the Gargoyles.