It is probably a bad thing that I want a glass of red wine this early in the day.
Although I am listening to a recording of Pieter Wispelwey playing the Bach gamba sonatas that a friend of the friends-in-same-circles kind of acquaintance lent to me (among a veritable pile of other recordings), and it is doing wonders to keep me from throwing myself over the edge of the cliff into madness. Thanks, Tina!
I wish I could talk about the role of appliances in hearthcraft and home-based spirituality without sounding like I’m flighty and unbased in any sort of reality.
Total word count, hearthcraft book: 48,104
New words today: 2,329
One wonders how much I could have done if I had not crashed and been useless between one-thirty and three-thirty. Stupid blood sugar. Why have you dropped like a stone the past two days when I’ve been feeding you properly?
A basic purification ritual, smudging and making smudge sticks, and incense today.
Am beginning to see 50K looming, and am now quietly panicking about fitting everything in under 60K. I may end up cutting things out. This is not unusual. The problem is deciding what bits I haven’t yet written that are least important and therefore can be excised without impacting the strength and quality of the book.
…is happening.
I am only posting this to show off the shiny new made-for-me icon that Curtana whipped off for me, at a request made only two hours ago. She is a very talented lady and is to be applauded. Yay her!
A thousand words before lunch. Well, before noon, anyway; I had leftover homemade pizza around eleven this morning.
This is a Good Start to a Good Day. Even if it all goes downhill from here, I have a thousand new words.
I worked one fifteen-minute set, then went directly into another timed quarter-hour because I didn’t want to lose my train of thought. The I took a break to put a load of laundry in, worked through the third official timed quarter-hour, and kept going when it ended to finish up the section. Fifteen minute blocks are easy. Ten minutes is too short, a half-hour is too long, but fifteen minutes… Why didn’t I start doing this ages ago?
Total word count, hearthcraft book: 45,775
New words today: 1,909
Terms, techniques, recipes. Made pizza dough for tonight, cut a third off to make focaccia as a snack for myself, devoured it all except for one wee wedge, realized that focaccia is hearth-bread, and added a recipe for it because really, how perfect is that?
Best tyop of the day: “Ficus on the goal”.
Today, as part of my plan (a) to not panic and (b) increase self-discipline so things would actually get done (oh, and (c) not burn myself out) I wrote in timed fifteen-minute periods, giving myself a break between each of them. On those breaks, which were often fifteen minutes themselves, I made tea, lunch, a snack, or checked mail and poked around the Internet. It worked very, very well because not only did I control my break time, I could see how much writing I actually got done in fifteen minutes without distraction.
In a somewhat unrelated aside, now that I’m wearing my glasses pretty much all the time, when I don’t wear them my eyes hurt.
I think I’m okay as regards the whole ‘ack this isn’t a BOOK yet’/’how am I going to fit everything in’ issue. If I finish smoothing out what I’ve got (i.e. make real sentences and link them) and write the missing bits, compose the blessings and rituals, and DON’T GET SIDETRACKED BY SHINY NEW IDEAS, everything should just about come in at 60K as a tidy parcel.
And because it was work-avoiding last Friday while I should have been working on the copy-edits of the pregnancy book, I didn’t formally record the progress made in the hearthcraft book. So here, for the sake of complete record-keeping:
New words February 29: 817
New total: 43,866
I am trying to be thankful that this storm has given us a dozen centimetres of ice pellets so far instead of the skating rinks other areas have received. Except I just got home after dropping the boy at the caregiver’s and HRH at the metro, then doing a brief stop in at the grocery store for essentials, and after trying to drive through the gales of wind and the accumulated ice pellets that behave like wet sand, it’s moderately difficult to be thankful. Particularly when winter just keeps on going. (Lying groundhogs — the Canadian ones said spring would be early. Can one sue a rodent?)
There is almost no one on the roads, and the grocery store was deserted. That’s good, I suppose.
I was going to write an open letter to winter, but Mousme beat me to it and did it better than I could have done, too. It’s more succinct, and certainly more polite. Oh look; it’s now snowing big fluffy Christmas flakes out there. Whatever; I just don’t want it to turn into freezing rain.
To work! I’ve had to reschedule the topic I was going to work on today, after discovering last night that the two books I was intending to use for reference were useless. I shall move on to one I was less mentally prepared to write.