Category Archives: Writing

In Which She Wonders What To Do Now

This morning after I dropped the boy off I did some banking, picked up a few things like milk and juice, searched fruitlessly all over for the toy car Liam’s chosen as his next potty goal, bought a linen skirt and shirt with the gift certificates/credit notes from Christmas gifts that didn’t fit, and searched equally fruitlessly for dark coloured t-shirts that aren’t handkerchief thin. I’ve been fighting an odd throat cold for the past five days. I had no voice at all on Thursday and Friday, one that rasped and faded in and out on Saturday and Sunday, and isn’t much better today. While I was out I found a Tylenol product for aches and dry cough, so I’ll be taking those to help me sleep. We’ve been running the humidifier but my throat is still spasmy and tickly at night. I’m hoping these help suppress the dry cough.

When Ceri was over on Saturday she teased me by asking what I was going to jump into next, and course I had nothing officially lined up. The first few days post-book are always odd: I want to give myself a break, but I’m restless and keep trying to think of things to do. There’s a box of cello books that will be here tomorrow or Wednesday, but that’s not soon enough. I usually leave the reference books associated with a particular project by my desk for a while too, but by late Friday afternoon I’d cleared all the hearthcraft ones away and was left staring at an empty space on my desk. I turned around to look at my shelves and saw my Vivaldi biographies.

Guess what’s starting up again in my brain.

I realised that for some reason I’d never made a themed notebook for my Vivaldi research, so while the boy napped on Sunday I opened my file and browsed through the images I’d saved a year and a half ago as inspiration, then searched for one or two more for landscapes and such things. I resized some and put them through a sepia filter, printed them out, and tried a couple of layouts. I have one I’m happy with, so I may try to transfer it to my notebook this afternoon. The last time I did one of these it didn’t work as well, though; the ink ran and soaked through the paper. I may have to test different glues and varnishes first so I don’t ruin it.

Evidently I was tapping in to a worldwide Vivaldi movement in October of 2006, because there are an unusual number of books and documentaries being released and filmed now. There’s nothing along the lines of what I’m writing, though, so I’m going to try slipping back into it.

Not that I may have much time! I have a meeting this coming Friday morning with the company for whom I did language consulting work last spring, to talk about the sequel project.

Ta-Da!

Gentle readers, the book tentatively titled The Way of the Hearth Witch: The Magic of Hearth and Home is finished.

All chapter numbers have been corrected, both in chapter headings and in the text; all the proper coding and formatting has been inserted; I caught some things that I had to handle; I took some things out, popped others in, and made sure my bibliography actually listed the books I suggested people read. The final word count stands at 60,141. (There are 6,328 words languishing in my file of deleted material, to give you an idea of what’s come out in the past few days.)

Now I will write my cover letter, and send it off to my editor. And then I suspect I’ll wander around the house aimlessly for a couple of hours, because I do not remember what Life Without Book is like.

ETA: I just sent it all off. I love this book again; I no longer hate it. And you know, I don’t think there’s ever been a book I’ve handed in where I wasn’t wibbly about whether they’d like it or not. I am proud of it; that is what matters this time. And I think they’ll like it.

Erm…

… I think I just finished the book.

Not Finished-Finished, as in ‘I can send this off to the editor now’, but finished-finished in that I think it’s all basically there, and I just need to go through it to insert/check formatting code and scan for highlighted areas where I left myself notes to tidy up or explain or insert things.

There are the rough patches and bits where my argument kind of stops and needs a better summing up before moving on to the next topic, but I’ll leave those for the editors to point out. I can always keep looking at it on my end and fix them when the first rewrite comes back. (I am still twitching obsessively to a degree, but it’s only taken me five books to learn that it does not all have to be perfect in the first draft. Mostly perfect is acceptable.)

And then there’s the search for references to chapter numbers that I have to find and correct, thanks to the new chapter 2.5 (soon to be Chapter Three!). The new chapter is only ten pages long, which is about half the size of an average chapter in this book, so I suspect I’ll be asked to move other material into it or create something the editors feel is missing there. Right now I am too fried to look for it, and the other stuff takes precedence.

So yeah: Finished-Finished tomorrow. Wow. After officially beginning in November and living with the subject for five months, I am definitely at the point of the relationship with this book where I need time away. (it’s not you, book, it’s me, please don’t take it personally.)

It has been a very good day.

A Very Good Day So Far, And More To Come

I’m feeling terrific today. It’s sunny and going up to 21 degrees C (woo!). I did a pile of groceries after dropping a cheerful boy off at the caregiver’s, bought myself an Iced Cappuccino on the way home, and sat on the front balcony in the sun to write sixish pages of ritual and new chapter material. Go me! And I did it in a tank top and rolled-up jeans, too; it was that warm and sunny. Evidently I need capris, and soon. Maggie sat in the sun with me, and Cricket complained until I let her out too, at which point she tried to run away from home by jumping to the neighbours’ balcony and down to their front porch. I came inside, put my shoes on, and went out round front to pick her up. She fought me every step of the way home. She wouldn’t last half a day out there, and I told her so, but she wouldn’t listen, the ungrateful thing.

Also in the day’s good news column, I was contacted to reprise my consultant position on a sequel project by the company I did two-ish months of in-house work for last spring. My first thought was, “Yay, I can meet Ceri and Scott regularly for lunch, and do group lunches with like-minded individuals every once in a while!”. My second was, “They liked me, they really liked me!” And the third was, “Yay, excellent and regular income!”. Then I remembered that I was looking forward to being home with the boy again once the book had been handed in and only sending him to daycare two days a week, and I was a bit sad, but work is work. I’ll negotiate working a day at home every couple of weeks. The contract is just a contract and won’t be forever, just another couple of months.

Naturally, because I have just foreseen an influx of money, I have just queried my favourite on-line cello supply store about half a dozen books of sheet music and essays and the associated shipping and handling. I am incorrigible. I am also hoping Shiny New Books will inspire me to practice more. That may be problematic if I’m working full-time. Ah well, books keep.

Now to transcribe all the handwritten material from this morning and see what kind of state Chapter 2.5 is in. And I have more handwritten stuff from last night to insert in the final chapter as well. Hmm. I have piles of paper all over my desk, and I can’t tell what’s what as I used the backs of the printed chapters as scratch paper… except where I used them to expand upon what was on the opposite printed page. This could be interesting.

Eleventh Hour

I just realised that the book is missing a chapter.

*facepalm*

No, no, it’s not that I miscounted and in fact have two non-existent chapters to assemble; only Chapter Ten needs the rits and such, which is what I’m working on today. I was scanning the four pages of random notes I’d been typing in at the end of the file when they suddenly clicked for me, and I realised that there really needs to be a separate chapter addressing how one works with a spiritual hearth.

This is not the staggering crisis it may seem. The fourish pages of notes tie together quite nicely, and there were threeish pages in Chapter Two that I’ve just moved into what I’m currently calling Chapter Two Point Five. The material really needs its own focus instead of being shoehorned into Chapter Two. Suddenly things are falling into place, and I’m somewhat relieved because I was always vaguely unhappy with the whole nebulosity of this particular element in the book.

It is, however, a minor crisis in that I now have to smooth out/link/expand another chapter when I thought I was all done but for the final chapter. Chapter Two Point Five has just been scheduled for Friday in place of obsessively scanning the MS.

This is a good thing. It’s not such a good thing in that I’ve just created more work for myself, but the book will be the better for it.

Sigh.

Today’s Wiktory!

57,017 and only one more chapter to go! Well, to write, actually, because it currently consists of a page and a half of ideas for rituals and so forth.

Plus formatting and that [INSERT BRILLIANT RITUAL HERE], but that’s what Wednesday and Thursday are for. Friday is for obsessively scanning the MS before sending it off.

Off to get the boy!

Slogging

That’s Chapter Seven and Eight done. I wish I felt better about it but I don’t. I still have formatting to do, and I know I’m deliberately leaving some places rough or thin enough to be pointed out by the editors. If they do get pointed out I’ll handle them then because I can’t do anything about it now, and the fact that I’m okay with this decision upsets me deeply. I feel like I’m brushing it off, or assuming we can fix it in post-production, or putting the equivalent of a mental sticky-note on it and saying ‘I know this doesn’t work, do you have any suggestions?’… none of which constitute living up to my responsibility.

Everything hurts. My spine is just radiating pain, and that’s made me very short with people today. It’s hard to focus on work like this, because sitting hurts. Focusing is also a challenge because the farther along in the book I go the less structured it is. Part of that is the design of it — the later chapters are disjointed because they’re techniques and recipes and crafts and exercises — but it’s disheartening after having pulled off so much awesome work in the other six chapters. I feel like I’m hacking out rough, rude little approximations of writing and just kind of sticking them in.

Writing a new book sounded like a good idea at the time last July when I suggested redoing this proposal. Sigh.

I wrote my editor an e-mail today confirming that it would be submitted next Friday because I felt I hadn’t been clear when we’d discussed the new deadline (I had proposed the 15th, she suggested the 18th). I also told her about the FMS thing, because I felt I owed her an explanation for not being as on top of things as I have been for the past five years (yikes, has it been that long?). I hadn’t wanted to tell her until I’d handed the book in, because I didn’t want it to seem like an excuse, but I felt she deserved to know on the heels of the juggled deadlines and the proofs.

I’m going to knock off for the day. I’ll do some notebook work tonight. The hard copy has almost reached the point of uselessness because of the fragmented state of the final two chapters. I’ll see what I can do with it. I stopped using it in Chapter Seven because it was easier to do the edits directly in the file itself.

Things would be easier if there weren’t other issues going on behind the scenes here. It’s frustrating that they won’t clear up until the end of next week, which is when I hand in the MS.