I don’t want to keep these roasted vegetables for soup tonight. I want to eat them all right now.
Well, no. I’m not actually hungry. What I really want to do is sit and breathe in the fabulous smell of roasting vegetables all day.
I have just remembered that I don’t have a food processor. I can try to blenderize some of them, but I suspect that might not work too well.
Hrm.
Work? What work? I’ve done five loads of laundry and have baked bread, though. As well as chopped and roasted vegetables.
Here we go again with the multiple projects in a single post. I have icon schizophrenia. Hurrah for plot bunnies to the rescue. (Something that’s not often said, really. Usually plot bunnies are roundly cursed as distracting.)
Orchestrated:
New words today: 1,964
Total word count, Orchestrated: 30,716
And yay, things begin to fall apart. In the plot and for the protagonist, I mean, not for me doing the plotting/writing thing. Yay for outlines. Next time I get to take away the thing that my protagonist has fought so hard to regain. Muah hah hah hah.
Swan Sister:
New words today: 1,739
Total word count, Swan Sister: 34,030
Again, yay for outlines and story cards that have notes on them and have been ordered into writable sequence. And here’s me throwing stuff in, too. Which may mess up the story cards and the sequence, who knows? We’ll see when we get there.
And the grand total for the day: 3,703.
For some reason Swan Sister decided to drag itself out of the undead novel closet. This is not what I need. I’m trying to have Orchestrated finished by the end of the year so I can send queries out to agents. I do not need an undead swan novel battering at my brain.
Yeah, have fun with that imagery, zombie fans.
What I suspect my subconscious might be doing (other than attempting to sabotage me, but I’m so wise to that tactic by now) is offering me an alternate way to warm up. When I have two things to work on at once I can use A as an excuse to avoid work on B, and work in general gets done. (Or vice versa.) My overall productivity goes up.
What do I get at the end of all this? Well, theoretically I’m just aiming to have one novel complete. But Swan Sister is half-written and the second half of it does exist in plotted-out story cards. If using it to warm up for Orchestrated also manages to get it closer to being a complete first draft, that’s fine by me.
I found those twelve handwritten Swan Sister pages I scribbled out six months ago in the associated notebook, too. Haven’t transcribed them yet though. First of all, I’m saving it for when I need a gratifying word count boost, and second of all the bit I wrote hasn’t arrived in the plot yet, and I kind of want to bridge the characters from where they are now to where they need to be for the handwritten stuff to be added.
Finally, I had a candy-making day with Ceri this past Saturday (yes, because by the day after Halloween we obviously hadn’t been exposed to enough sugar) and she dropped three containers of the finished product off while we were grocery shopping yesterday. I have consumed more sugar today than I did all last month, which is saying something. Evidently I have zero self-control because I just keep wandering into the kitchen, popping open one of the containers, pulling a piece or two out and wandering back into my office.
Time to switch to the iBook in the living room. Or maybe I’ll try working in the reading chair here in my office. So long as it’s not the desktop I’m using, I think I’ll be okay. (Do not ask me why Orchestrated does not work on the desktop. I do not know. Keyboard? The Mac layout/design/screen? It’s a mystery. I’m not going to mess with the vibe.)
Kushiel’s Mercy by Jacqueline Carey
How To Ditch Your Fairy by Justine Larbalestier
The Sisters Grimm 1: The Fairy-Tale Detectives by Michael Buckley
Inkdeath by Cornelia Funke
Mortal Love by Elizabeth Hand (reread)
The Comfort of a Muddy Saturday by Alexander McCall Smith
Cassandra and Jane by Jill Pitkeathley
Cupcake by Rachel Cohn
Exploring the Northern Tradition by Galina Krasskova
Ravens of Avalon by Diana Paxson
Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan (reread)
Slow month.
… even when the country’s not his own.
SPARKY: [enters MAMA’S office and sees a picture of BARACK OBAMA on the computer monitor] Who’s that?
MAMA: Barack Obama. The United States, which is a country just south of Canada, is having an election, and Barack Obama is one of the people running for president. Remember when we went and voted for our government? The United States is having their election in four days.
SPARKY: [as he turns and dashes out of the office] Okay! I’ll be there!
My son is nothing if not supportive. I wish more people of voting age had his enthusiasm about elections. I mean, this kid is ready to go vote in the US election, and he’s (a) not American, and (b) not of legal age. But then I’m not American either, and I’m ready to vote in the US election just to help make sure the country doesn’t shoot itself in the head again. Or at least shoots itself in a different way this time; one cannot know until one has tried.
ETA: I should probably link the post I was reading when Sparky came into the office.
Yesterday was made of fail. I want it wiped from my mind and from the record in general, thanks. The only good points were scoring the cello case and my lesson. Oh, and the boy opening a thank-you gift from the Nightdemons family for the use of his baby swing and absolutely loving it. (Thank you!)
Seriously, I know that for a variety of reasons I must be stressed, but I didn’t need to combined total of two and a half hours in traffic. Especially when it made me late for both things I needed to be at on time. Especially not on top of the driving out into an area I’d never been, and through traffic there too earlier in the day. I cried in frustration so much yesterday at various times that I have the crying-hangover thing happening this morning.
Thanks go out to Pdaughter for keeping the boy an hour past her regular ‘closing time,’ for the hug, and the glass of cold water, and the rolls of Rockets; to HRH, who ordered Chinese food; to the boy himself for gently patting away my tears with a tissue and for his patience; and to Nightdemons for providing that little bit of gift joy when we finally got home last night.
I hate, hate, hate that after doing next to nothing all spring and summer, construction companies rip roads up just before winter, and more than they should at once in that final rush to get a Band-aid on the roads before the snow falls. I hate that there is no way to get wherever I need to go without encountering construction-based traffic on every alternate route I can think of, traffic made worse by people trying to avoid yet other construction. I would so be doing the public transportation thing if it wouldn’t take three times as long as a car trip and take three buses. Even with the traffic.
I am determined that today will be nothing but relaxed. And there is the boy’s first official Halloween excursion tonight to look forward to. Yesterday he was practising: “I knock on the door, and they open the door, and I say ‘trick or treat!’ and they give me… good luck.” Good luck? Whatever. I’m not going to correct him. The first time someone gives him candy his head is going to explode. Am I am so looking forward to seeing it.
I’ve dropped the boy off, gone to the bank (as usual, misjudging the amount I needed to withdraw so I have to go back again), done groceries, picked up ribbon, picked up dark transfer paper for HRH’s t-shirt, had brunch, and have just returned from a drive to Ahuntsic. That was certainly an adventure. Why GoogleMaps didn’t just tell me to go up the 15 to Henri-Bourassa, the street I needed to be on, I do not know. Instead I went all over the place in crazy circles and turns to get to L’Acadie. (Turns out there’s an exit for L’Acadie on the 15 too. Good grief.) Also, the Met is one of my least favourite highways to travel.
Anyway, in Ahuntsic I viewed and purchased a lovely light hard cello case. It is brown! With a grey interior! And it has backpack straps and good handles and a huge pocket for sheet music! I’m thrilled. It’s only about eight pounds, and since other hard cases boast about being light at 12 or 13 lbs, I’m feeling pretty smug. Don’t know the maker; there’s no identifying tag. The one drawback is that it doesn’t fit in the trunk. But it does fit across the back seat if I raise the armrests on the boy’s booster seat, so huzzah!
Yes, I’m pretty set case-wise forever now. Unless something happens to this hard case like happened to my first one, namely something punching a hole in the bottom while it was being shipped by train to Toronto.
I received what could very well be in the top ten worst pieces of news to receive this morning while dropping the boy off at the caregiver’s: Emru’s not doing well at all. I didn’t know this because I hadn’t been on-line since yesterday afternoon, and the news hit me like a physical blow. I had to surreptitiously reach out to brace myself against the door because everything started to go wobbly. I held it together for about half an hour, then found myself dissolving into tears in the cereal aisle of the grocery store. About two weeks ago it was the eighteenth anniversary of the unexpected death of one of my best friends, so this isn’t a great time of year for me to begin with. And like that friend, Emru’s classified as one of the best among us, and while I wouldn’t wish leukaemia on anyone it seems beyond unfair that it should take threaten to take someone as all-round good a person as Emru is. I cannot begin to imagine how his family must feel.
So. On top of all the racing around and emotional stuff going on today, I’m having what I used to call a flopsy day, which I now understand is a bad fibro day: muscles lacking strength to handle fine motor stuff and even some of the mid-range motor stuff. I can’t speak French to save my life today; my tongue and my lips won’t form the proper shapes required. I can’t hold a pencil or write properly, either. I’m mildly concerned about my lesson, but I’ll let my teacher know the situation. Looking back I see that this began yesterday, which partially explains the awful, awful showing I made of a stupidly easy passage in a Brahms Hungarian dance last night (when, naturally, the celli were playing alone to work the passage). On the plus side, my bow hold was more like the new one and less like the old one, and evidently I was bowing in some sort of proper form because the large muscles on the right side of my back were sore when I got home (the soreness was not the good part, the good part was that to get them sore I had been using them, which I was supposed to be doing).
Food now, then packing for the lesson, then resting a bit, then to the lesson I go. I’m worried about getting from the lesson, which ends at five in Pointe-Claire, to the caregiver’s, which is in Montreal West. Traffic is going to be awful. If this doesn’t work I’ll need to find another time slot, and finding this one was hard enough what with having the car and no small person to care for only once a week.
Right. Let’s get on that, then.