Twelve days left. Scary! Exciting! The pressure is mounting. I’m plugging away at the manuscripts, of course, and I think I’m in fine shape regarding the deadline, but you just never know. I’m not certain how it’s all going to come together. I’m still just brainstorming, creating, brainstorming, creating. I’m sure I have some sense of what will go where, but no clear picture. And it’s something I’ll just keep working on until time runs out. That’s what a deadline is for: it tells you when to quit.

Today I proofed 29 puzzles, simplifying and tweaking and correcting. My natural tendency and preference is toward more challenging puzzles, and I was on a serious roll yesterday. Strange as it may seem, I have a harder time crafting easy puzzles for the younger ages. I’m not kidding. I sat down tonight with the intention of creating a couple of very straightforward code puzzles and instead wound up generating 2 lists of words for more complicated puzzles because the quotes I had chosen lent themselves so well to these lists! I couldn’t waste or ignore the “connections” between the quotes and the lists. A straightforward code should be for some quote that has no connections. Except if you look hard enough–or in my case, not hard at all–Everything has connections, so nothing is suitable for a simple straightforward code.

Sometimes it’s hard to be me. I think I feel lazy and lame offering up simple puzzles. Anyone can do that. I want to do what others can’t, or more likely won’t take the time to do.

It was another great day. Very productive and fun. This is a great stage: I know the material well and can play with it. I’m giving myself until the 9th to just create. At that point, I’ll sort through everything I have, divide activities between the 2 books, fill holes, toss weak or repetitive activities, and begin to assemble into 2 manuscripts. Some of that is probably already happening in the back of my head, but it will remain in the back of my head until the 9th.