Category Archives: Words Words Words

In Which She Does Math And Is Pleased With The Result

I’ve worked it out.

To meet deadline, I have to write 3,500 words per week. If I only work three days a week (also known as the days Liam is at daycare or with his grandma), that’s a quota of 1,200 words on each work day.

(Anyone familiar with my average output laughing yet?)

Breaking down the estimated word count, it works out to around twenty pages or 5,000 words per chapter, although that’s always flexible. After all, this is just me taking the estimated length and dividing by the number of chapters I’ve sketched out. There’s about three thousand unassigned words left over that I’m leaving free, since I have a bad habit of creating monster chapters that must commit mitosis in order to maintain thematic unity and to allow the poor reader to (a) take a break, and (b) think straight. I always worry about making the target MS length, and I shouldn’t because every time I create an overabundance of material and end up having to trim it down. And when I get the CEM back for rewrites I’m always asked to expand certain ideas, which also produces more word count. It looks like this time, I may have to worry about keeping the MS below target length from the very beginning! For example, there are lots and lots of rituals in this book. And spell-type things, and meditations. And some lists. These always take up more room than I expect them to. I’ve given myself plenty of time in which to do it all, as well.

Focus, focus, focus. That’s still the key.

My table of contents is finished. I think I’m going to open a new file, name it by the book title, and start throwing ideas down because they’re coming thick and fast. And at some point I’m going to call for questions and ideas from all of you as well. (Well, those of you associated with the topic, anyhow.)

Good News: She’s Back

The series for which I helped develop the proposal has been accepted. (This means I get a small finder’s fee of sorts, a pleasant thing.)

My own proposal for one of the books within that series has also been accepted. I got the offer today. Shorter book, definitely less money, but it’s a subject I really want to write about, so I’m taking it. (There’s an art budget! Woo!)

And the other book I was asked to write has been scheduled for after this series book, so I can pick that one up after this one is written.

I’m back. Oh, I am so back. And this after five different people asked me over the weekend how the writing was going, to which I could only reply that it hasn’t been going at all, plain and simple. Full-time mom, can’t work. But with part-time daycare, and a contract…

Oh yes. I’m back.

And in a nice symmetry, it was a year ago tomorrow that I delivered the green witch book. I’ve had almost exactly a year off from professional writing. (Slogging through the copyedits and rewrites don’t count here; I mean the actual coming up with stuff and putting it on a blank page for the first time.)

Now I have to go work out a writing schedule with quotas and so forth, write that table of contents, and expand my outline so that I have a good solid skeleton with which to work.

Oh Look, Ten A.M. And My Patience Is Non-Existent

This is already a bad, bad day.

It started yesterday afternoon with me feeling ill. This morning, still ill, I’m running into scheduling problems as well. As a result I have zero patience and am very close to throwing all my scheduled activities into other people’s faces and telling them to handle everything, because I’m really tired of being the one who co-ordinates.

It doesn’t help that the only thing I got done on my list of things to do yesterday afternoon was the cello. I worked for almost two hours straight on three different songs, which is a good thing because I wanted to finalise a couple of bits I’d been developing and some of it sounds beautiful, but not so good in that it’s the only thing I ended up doing. Also in that a disproportionate amount of time was spent trying to fix something that seemed broken, thanks to a tabber’s idiocy in not correctly identifying the source of the tab I was using as a basis for constructing a bassline.

On the good side of things, however, Liam had another awesome day at daycare yesterday. This time he got to play with two other children, a boy only a couple of months older than he is and a girl of four and a half. This was very okay in his books, as he likes to watch older children playing. He’s going to get more of it today, because we’re headed over to the ADZO homestead so that HRH can indulge in some well-earned playtime with the guys, and thus Liam and I get to play with other mummies and babies. And he’ll get a bit of it tomorrow before he goes to bed as well, because there are children coming to the neighbours’ housewarming.

In Which She Admits How Much Of A Fraidy-Cat She Truly Is

Thank you everyone for your expressions of support and sympathy for the tree massacre. We’ll be planting the crabapple this fall, and in the meantime we’ll be putting up eight-foot strips of lattice and planting fast-growing vines to screen our yard from the one behind us, and to provide some sort of shade so that Liam and I can play in the yard again. If the lilacs don’t die, they’ll take about four years to come back properly, and provide privacy and shade.

Liam is off at daycare again today. He woke up four times last night after we got home around 11.30, one time enough to need to be picked up and cuddled back to sleep. Oddly enough, the loud electrical storm we had didn’t seem to bother him when things were crashing and flashing right above the house for a good half hour. But he woke up roughly every couple of hours, which meant that we did too, to lie in bed and wait to see if he’d wake up completely or just half-awaken and cry a bit before self-soothing back to sleep. As a result we didn’t sleep that well, either. Good thing we had an excellent evening out relaxing beforehand.

We think his molars are coming in, because the random biting has started up again and he sticks anything and everything into the back of mouth to gnaw. That might be one of the reasons he woke up so often, too.

I ran around and did errands this morning after dropping Liam off, and one of them involved going to the Chapters on the West Island to kick around for an hour until the shop I needed to visit in Fairview mall opened at 10:00. (And the only thing I’m going to say about the second shop is that I seem to have reached a pants size that’s smaller than I wore before I was pregnant. Smaller than I’ve ever worn, actually. I’m not sure how that happened.) And while I was in the bookstore, I did something that absolutely terrified me: I asked a clerk about their policy on authors signing shelf stock.

I am incredibly shy. To admit in person, in real-life public, that I wrote not only one book but three is a huge thing. A huge, terrifying thing. I have been in dozens and dozens of shops that carry my books, and I just kind of see them there on the shelf, then smile a bit and look away quickly, because heaven forbid anyone sees me and somehow intuits that those books were written by me, because then people will make a fuss and look at me, and I will melt from confusion and embarrassment. Not because I’m ashamed of my books, you understand. I’m very proud of them. Just not in a loud “look what I did!” sort of way. (Journal completely aside, of course. Writing about it is different. And even here I tend to worry about the flaws and the challenges more than anything else.) This is the main reason why I still haven’t done an event or a signing.

I managed to not ask this question of the five friendly staff members who paused to wish me a good day and ask if I needed any help while I wandered around. There was just something so calm and kind about Jessica (nametags are so helpful) when she was scanning the books I was purchasing, so I asked her. And she said that often they had authors in for events, or they dropped off consignment copies, and was I looking for a signed copy of something in particular? And then I had to say that no, I was, um, an author, and they had three copies of my books on the shelf, and did they want them signed? She said then that she was pretty sure the store would love me to sign them, took my name, and called the manager to verify. The manager was indeed thrilled, and said yes yes yes, and so off I went to fetch the two copies of Solitary Wicca and the single copy of Spellcraft (no Green Witch, alas), and I signed them.

The Indigo chain puts stickers that indicate signed books on autographed copies.

So there; that was today’s terribly big adventure. Hurrah to Jessica. I hope she has an excellent day.

Now I have fourish hours in which to work on Swan Sister, do a draft outline of a table of contents for a book I proposed in case someone asks me for it, and practice the cello for a bit in prep for this weekend’s rehearsal.

Heartbroken

Oh, my gods — they’ve just cut down the huge lilac tree that stood behind our backyard fence. I went out to bring the laundry in off the clothesline and I saw the bare stumps of what was once a magnificent tree, broad and almost as tall as the powerlines, and they were naked, brutal, and ugly. Words can’t describe how dreadful it looks, how open and exposed the backyard suddenly feels.

Everything was fine an hour and a half ago when Liam and I were out there. And now, it’s gone.

I’m fighting tears. I loved that lilac tree.

UPDATE: They had a whack at the other lilac tree as well. HRH talked to the people who were cutting them down, and they swear they’re just trimming them so they’ll grow back thicker next year. HRH looked at them and said, “Yes, if you haven’t killed them, because you’re supposed to trim them in the spring, not the high heat of summer.” And ‘trim’ doesn’t mean a hack job leaving a couple of feet of bare trunks, like these people have done because they don’t know how to prune properly.

We’re getting a crabapple tree to give us shade and privacy, because this is ridiculous.

“There is nothing like staying at home for real comfort.”

This is such a delightful idea:

RIP
Jane Austen
16 Dec 1775 – 18 Jul 1817
Goddess of Writers
Priestess of Irony

In memory of Rev. George Austen’s daughter, please leave condolences in the form of quotations &tc.

Don’t leave them here, though; or rather, you can if you like, but go to Peg Kerr’s journal and leave them there too, as that’s whence this was plucked.

The one I left was from the first chapter of Northanger Abbey:

[P]rovided that nothing like useful knowledge could be gained from them, provided they were all story and no reflection, she had never any objection to books at all. But from fifteen to seventeen she was in training for a heroine; she read all such works as heroines must read to supply their memories with those quotations which are so serviceable and so soothing in the vicissitudes of their eventful lives.

It’s always amused me.