Category Archives: Writing

Gah! Done!

It took way, way, way too long to finish up today. I started working at 7:40 AM and spent most of the morning on the iBook in the living room. Once I moved in here to handle polishing the review things fell apart. I don’t like this not-able-to-work-in-my-office trend. It’s bad. I suspect if I’d stayed in the living room I’d have focused better.

Anyway, it’s four, and I’m exhausted so I’m not even going to contemplate working on Orchestrated. I need to fall over with a book. Nixie has been at me to be elsewhere too, placing herself like a little black statue on my desk between my keyboard tray and the monitor, purring at me; every once in a while she’s reached out a tiny black paw with the claws ever so slightly extended, patting my hands or my sweater sleeves, coaxing me to stroke her.

Mailboy joy today included two of the Scrabble tile pendants I bought last week (super fast shipping!), which are even lovelier in person (I will buy brown velvet ribbon on which to string them when I am racing all over creation tomorrow), and the new issue of Strings. Let’s hope this one is better than the last one. I will read that, and finish Justine Larbalestier’s How to Ditch Your Fairy.

Orchestra tonight. And I have no idea what to do for dinner.

Orchestrated Update

Yes, gentle readers, not only have I baked two loaves of bread, made pizza dough, and a batch of new incense, but I have added to Orchestrated!

New words today: 2,493
Total word count, Orchestrated: 28,739

Makes me want to go add seven words just so I can type ‘2,500.’

And just because I am feeling smug:

Total word count, Nine Noble Virtues workshop: 3,092

Over 5,000 words today. Very nice. Plus the incense and the bread and the other stuff. The one thing I haven’t done today is practise, but I forgive myself. Also, my fingers are all non-fine-motor-skills today for some reason, and I had trouble standing up properly this morning, so.

Time to wrap things up before HRH picks me up o nhis way home so we can do the purchasing of Pizza Toppings Autumn Forgot Yesterday as well as milk and coffee and other things I didn’t know we needed, and then collect the small boy from Grandma’s house.

Today So Far…

… is running precisely in schedule. (Now that I’ve said that, of course, life as we know it will collapse.)

I spent the morning outlining and expanding my workshop for tomorrow’s All-Day-Double-CovenPalooza, and finished polishing it pretty much on the stroke of noon, which is when I wanted it done. There is bread rising. When that’s done and in the oven, there will be pizza dough made. (Note to self: You forgot to pick up peppers and mushrooms yesterday, scatterbrain. Not that they were on the shopping list.) (Not that being on the list would have made any difference. Or maybe it might have, because I actually did get everything on the grocery list, just not the to-do list.) I had breakfast, and lunch, too. I even managed a shower. The postman brought HRH’s copy of Fable II, and my copy of The Red Violin, so I have a new movie to watch tonight while we pack for CovenPalooza.

My last evaluation/review of the book that brought me so much pain was accepted, no edits required. You have no idea how thankful I am.

In the realm of music, I have just discovered Thea Gilmore and am thoroughly enjoying listening to Avalanche. Also still enjoying Alice Cooper’s latest, Along Came a Spider, and I recently pulled Christine Fellow’s The Last One Standing into rotation again.

I’m going to walk away from the desktop and the siren call of the Internet now and curl up with the iBook to reacquaint myself with Orchestrated. It’s very frustrating to do this in fits and starts, but one does what one can.

Headaches

Yesterday, not long after I wrote my journal entry about practising, my Internet connection went kablooey and I spent the next couple of hours unsuccessfully trying to fix it. I ended up turning the damn thing off and going to work in the living room. It gave me writing time, but I had tons of Internet-associated research to handle and correspondence to catch up on, and it made me very cranky. Also, I lost an expanded ETA form of that last post in which I rhapsodized about a particular shift that I love doing in one of my lesson pieces. And the post didn’t actually post thanks to the kablooeyness, I discovered this morning. Gnarr.

However, I managed to play cello for a while longer, and accomplished this as well:

Orchestrated:
New words yesterday: 2,508
Total word count, Orchestrated: 26,246

Uh-oh. The protagonist’s mother came home early and found her with a boy in the house. Alone. Playing music, but still. Also, a date? With someone else? What is this turning into? Where the hell did that come from?

Orchestra last night was good. I don’t know if someone mentioned something about our situation to the guest conductor but he’s really focusing on interpretation and phrasing. Quite nice. And the principal showed me a terrific fingering for the opening phrase of the Wagner clarinet piece we’re accompanying (five flats! dear gods!).

Today I have an awful, awful headache that extra-strength Tylenol is doing nothing to assuage. Thanks to this headache I fell asleep again while the boy was playing this morning and didn’t get him to the caregiver’s till just before ten o’clock, so the day started somewhat later than usual. I did get the Internet connection up and running once more, thanks to an installation CD lent to me by the upstairs neighbours (bless them) so that headache has been taken care of although it took an hour to do. We have groceries for dinner. I have mostly caught up on correspondence and stuff. I have even eaten lunch. There are more errands to run tomorrow morning.

Now I get to do a draft of a ritual, and write some more. My head hurts an awful lot, though. Time to drag out the white flower balm, and hit what I suspect is a baby migraine with some extra-strength Excedrin.

Today’s Writing

Can’t title this an exclusive Orchestrated update because ye gods, I was productive today on not one but two projects. I scare me sometimes.

Orchestrated:
New words today: 2,338
Total word count, Orchestrated: 23,738

Wow. Somehow the protagonist’s response to the first challenge turned into a standing-up-for-what’s-right. And there are icky politics involved. (Not political politics, the kind that pop up in any organization.)

Harpsichord Dreams:
New words today: 3,287
Total word count, Harpsichord Dreams: 3,427

Hello, gentle reader, meet my new project, the book of music-themed essays sporting the working title of Harpsichord Dreams. I need a proper icon for it. (Yay, a work-avoiding tactic for tomorrow!)

Allow me to record my grand total for the day, because it’s just going to make me smug:

Total words written today: 5,625

Wow. Yeah, that was worth it.

Cautiously Optimistic

Ah, sweet, sweet crackers. I have eaten half a box of Carr’s already and am feeling very chuffed. Next: The fresh bread that will be done in, oh, forty-five minutes. And the rest of yesterday’s soup.

The new cell phone is operational. The last customer service rep I spoke with was very supportive and sympathetic about the lost-then-stolen-phone plight, and we tsked together over ‘people today.’ Now I get to spend half an hour entering numbers from the address book. Oh, joy.

And there will be writing today, too, especially since I notified the central whatsit of the company for whom I’m currently doing freelance evaluations to tell them that it’s day five and I still don’t have the required material to complete the assignment given last Friday, so I’m telling them to take the assignment off my to-do list because even if they get it to me today I can’t hand it in by the deadline this Friday. As for what I will write today, I don’t know if it will be Orchestrated or some developmental work on the collection of essays I thought up the other day. (Upon a quick scan of the posts I’ve made over the past two weeks I see that I have not mentioned this project here at all. Consider this your notification, gentle readers: I thought up a themed collection of personal opinion essays the other day. There.) Or I could work on both, too. Nothing stopping me from working on one till I run out of steam, then turning to the other.

Orchestrated Update

New words today: 2,212
Total word count, Orchestrated: 21,400

Stiff and achy again today, with lousy power in the limbs. Stupid fibro.

Oh look, words. Yay for words! And look, we also broke the 20K barrier. w00t! We are officially over one-third of the way there. Another word meter is called for:

Zokutou word meterZokutou word meter
21,400 / 60,000
(35.7%)