Author Archives: Autumn

Today, Briefly

I would like to state for the record that my new cello pickup is teh awesome. There is zero loss of sound quality between the actual string vibrating and the amp output. Zero. I didn’t think that was possible. It’s worth every single penny. (Plus I finally get to use the patch cord I bought a year and a half ago.)

Also, band practice was excellent.

Liam’s new word today: “bubble”, said while watching his bath fill. This led to the phrase “bubble bath” directly afterwards as he put two and two together. He proceeded to eat a handful of them, then generously fed me a handful too, because he is all about the sharing.

I’m wrong; there were two new words. The other was “balloon”, because one was given to him by a server at the breakfast place we went to this morning. No, three: he said “soon”, too. Yes, the new words are coming thick and fast these days.

Poor kid, his teeth are driving him round the bend.The upper left incisor is now threatening to break the gum any moment. We can’t get our fingers near the lower set without being bitten with great and frustrated force, so we have no idea how close those two are. I picked up more infant Tylenol today on the way home, for everyone’s relief.

Now I’m going to go read Naomi Novik’s His Majesty’s Dragon in bed, because I have only one-third of the book left and it is good enough to be finished in a third sitting. It’s been sitting on my to-read pile since it was released, and I’m partially upset about having failed to read it before now and partially glad that I didn’t, because it’s perfect for what I want to be reading this week. (Also, as much as I adore Neil Gaiman’s writing, Fragile Things is not exactly relaxing bedtime reading because most of the stories hinge on slightly odd and/or creepy twists at the end that get odder and creepier the more you think about them.)

Liam Update

We have a new tooth! The upper right incisor has made an appearance. We are Bad Parents for not being quicker on the uptake: it looks like it came in a few days ago, and is a quarter of the way out already.

New words and sayings in the past two weeks include “bless you”, gentle, door, Grandma, Papa (Grandpa), two, close, “car go!”, shirt, apple, “all gone”, “all done”, as well as clear and properly used “thank you”, “yes”, and “no”.

He points at everything (or goes to touch it!) if you say the name of an object. Fridge, door, cat, chair, table, bath, light… but the best moment came about six weeks ago when he was eating dinner and babbling, “Mama, mama, mama” with a big smile while swinging his head back and forth. “Liam, Liam, Liam,” I chanted back at him and he stopped moving, sat up straight and patted his chest with both hands, a pleased little grin on his face. It was the first time he’d actively identified himself to us. It was an awesome moment, and I’m surprised I didn’t record it when it happened.

He’s started actively matching two images on his own. If there’s a dog on one page and a dog on the other, he’ll put his first two fingers together with his thumb and touch one, then touch the second. It’s interesting that this is a very specific hand position that he only uses to indicate two of the same object.

He flips through books with animals and says their names, mangling them sometimes in Liam-speak, but he knows them. He doesn’t seem to discern between the animal name and the sound it makes, so a cow is usually “mmmmmmoo”, a cat is usually “cat”, a dog is “dah” or “ff ff ff” (as in “arf” or “woof”), bees are “bssss” (and I have no idea if that’s the sound they make or the actual word), and fish are “fsh!”.

He can say “crow” too, because he was calling the Halloween crow prop over at his caregiver’s house an owl, and she taught him the right name for it. He confused us for a while by pointing to the top of the bookcases in the living rooms and saying “owl, owl”, and we kept trying to redirect his attention to the stuffed owl on the lower shelves. This past weekend HRH happened to be holding him at the time he said it, and finally caught on that Liam was pointing at the displayed cover of Solitary Wicca for Life, which has a small buff-coloured figure in a robe in the lower lefthand corner of the cover. From the other side of the room, it does look somewhat like an owl.

Okay, that’s your quick catch-up on Liam’s World.

Novella Update

My plans for the evening were derailed, and I wasn’t happy about it. So I wrote instead.

Total word count, Il Maestro e le Figlie di Coro: 31,629
Total words today: 3,013

And I did another 1,193 last night after Liam went to bed, too. (There, posterity, are you satisfied?)

I’ve been messing about with creating alternate meditations and rituals for two chapters of ESTC. I’m still not wholly certain about them at the moment, but I only started them today so they need time to evolve properly. It remains to be seen if they’ll create the effect I’m still trying to capture. I moved more things around to smooth out the final chapter too, but the eighth chapter is still defying me, possibly because birth is an incredibly spiritual thing to begin with, and to capture it in words is remarkably difficult without sounding either twee or dim.

It’s good to have two so very different projects on the go at once. When I get stuck or bored with one of them, I switch to the other and still get work done. (And don’t kid yourself — this is work. It’s what I do for a living. Some stuff I am fortunate enough to sell as partials, other stuff I need to write out before I can send it out on a quest for a home.)

An Ancient Muse, the new Loreena McKennitt album, is excellent. So is Fragile Things, the latest short fiction collection from Neil Gaiman that I started reading the other day. And in fact, I’m headed for bed to read more of it before I turn out the light.

McKennitt News

To promote her new album An Ancient Muse (which is quite good, although I’m only halfway through it so far), Loreena McKennitt will be appearing at the Galeries Laval location of Archambault (1545 Le Corbusier Blvd, Laval, QC) on December 2 at 14h00. It’s a bit of a commute outside Montreal, but it’s the only appearance she’s doing in the province at the moment. No concert dates have been announced yet, either, but I’m sure there will be.

fps Auction Launches Today!

The fps: the magazine of animation week-long online auction to raises funds for the Canadian Cancer Society goes live today! From today (that’s Wednesday, November 22 for those of you who haven’t checked yet) to Wednesday, November 29, 2006, anyone with Internet access will be able to bid on animation-related items put on eBay by fps.

Click the banner to be taken to the page that lists the items up for auction. The auction page also features a button that will take you directly to a form through which you can make a donation directly to the Canadian Cancer Society via the fps parent company 5×5 Media, if you wish to make a donation without participating in the auction. But hey — if you do participate, you get cool stuff as well as donating to a very worthy cause!

Here’s a sample of what’s available (snitched from the ever-lovely and -talented Kino Kid, as was an earlier sentence, because she is so very good with words):

* Original artwork from Steve Rude, Joel Trussell and Dave Alvarez, donated by the artists
* 2D and 3D animation software from Toon Boom Animation, Softimage, Autodesk, and e frontier
* A signed copy of Amid Amidi’s book, Cartoon Modern: Fifties Animation Design, personalized for the bidder
* A signed copy of Jeff Smith’s Bone Volume One in hardcover
* Anime DVDs, UMDs, CDs, and posters
* Ninja Tune’s ZenTV compilation DVDs, including animated videos from Mr. Scruff and Kid Koala

Please help us spread the word, and to raise funds to help improve the quality of life for those living with cancer.

Unexpected Mailbox Joy!

There was money in my mailbox today! Well, not actual money, but a cheque in US funds that I wasn’t expecting. I did a tech read for an excellent book in early October, and I completely forgot that the new consultant contract I’m working under pays me separately for things like that.

And you know what? Not only does this cheque completely cover what I paid for my new cello pickup, I will have extra left over. Which means I can buy both the new Loreena McKennitt album and Thomas Pynchon novel being released today without a twinge of guilt.

Hurrah!

Carrots

I began editing down and rearranging Chapter 8 of ESTC today. I took things out and added other things in, and I’ve got pretty much the same amount of words that I began with. More carrots, though, so that’s an improvement. (Carrots are the new measurement of how close to being finished a piece of writing is, after a discussion among friends of how inadequate word count alone is at reflecting completion started by Ceri. More carrots mean the piece is closer to being complete, including thinking and research and polishing and so forth.) Alas, carrots do not render down to a neat little summary the way word count does. So this paragraph will have to do to satisfy posterity.

I left Il Maestro e le Figlie di Coro to percolate for a few days, and went back to it tonight. This is still at the stage where word count reflects progress, because it’s about getting the story down in words, and so:

Total word count, Il Maestro e le Figlie di Coro: 27,423
Total words today: 2,312

I don’t think I’ve mentioned that I’m aiming for this to be around 60K words long, 70K max, as it’s a YA historical. So it’s roughly about a third of the way there. Not a third of the way done in terms of carrots, however, only word count. Although most of the broad planning for this novella is done, I won’t know how many carrots there are until the first draft is finished. Or I may have a better idea where things stand carrot-wise once I’ve written this second major part of the story, as the third part will be the aftermath.

All in all, a very good day.