Category Archives: Writing

Gnarr

I have thrown up my hands and walked away from the computer twice today. This last time I did it because the computer thought it would be a good idea to rename the drives, and then told me it couldn’t find any of my music because the G drive had mysteriously become the H drive. Apparently my computer has previously nicknamed my printer the G drive, so when I turned my printer on for the first time since adding the external hard drive to the family it remembered that the printer existed, shuffled everything down one step, and the poor hard drive got bumped. I tried turning the printer off and restarting the computer, but no luck.

So it came down to renaming my drives, or rebuilding the media library again. I chose option B, because I’ve done it before and nothing blew up.

But before I restarted it, I practised the cello some more to calm myself down and change my headspace. Spiegel im Spiegel! Go me!

Yet still, no actual new words in the book. It seems to be either feast or famine when it comes to actual production these days. It’s a low-energy day and I’m trying to cut myself some slack, but it’s hard when the deadline is muttering in the distance and I have to handle those pregnancy copy-edits next week or the week after that. I’ve been listlessly reading through the existing document today, trying to find something that my brain jumps on and wants to expand. Recipes. I should do recipes. Right. That is what I will do for the next hour, before HRH and the boy get home.

Hearthcraft Book Update

Total word count, hearthcraft book: 37,306
New words today: 2,206

Today’s topic: Food as a spiritual thing. I have to admit that some of today’s words came from an article that I wrote in the fall of 2005, that was in turn salvaged from a bunch of stuff that got cut from the green witch book. I’m considering them note-form thoughts for the moment, and so they’re all in bulleted italics awaiting rewriting and refocusing, because while it roughly delivers what I’m trying to get across I want to say it differently so as not to bore devoted readers! to better blend with the subject of the book. So they’re understudy words until the principal words are ready to go on stage.

Yikes. A day or two more of work and I’ll be at the two-thirds-done point. Then it’s just a couple of thousand words to the three-quarter mark, which is where I begin hyperventilating because there isn’t enough room to fit it all in, and there’s no way I will hand in another 80K book on a 60K contract. They’re not paying me enough.

Hearthcraft Book Update

Total word count, hearthcraft book: 35,100
New words today: 1,706

Altars, shrines, oil lamps. Lots of oil lamps. There will be even more on oil lamps, because one of the exercises involves making your own as a spiritual focus. I love them.

I got an extra hour of work in because HRH came home from work early to fight through traffic and poorly ploughed streets to fetch the boy and bring him home so that I wouldn’t have to. Bless him.

The Trials of Authorship

Sarah Rees Brennan made me laugh this morning:

Let’s talk about research. No, I don’t mean the comfortable kind of research where you sit with your glasses perched on the tip of your nose and go through sources until, by some crazed and circuitous route, you find yourself reading an essay on Stephen King’s Pet Sematary and remember you really only wanted to spend a minute checking how many days were in May.

The actual experience of research in the field is slightly different:

SARAH: Why would I pretend that I was writing a – oh my God. Oh my God, you all think I’m some kind of mechanics groupie, don’t you.
GRACIOUS LEADER (graciously): There’s no shame in it.
SARAH: …

I departed. It might be nice to depart places with one’s dignity intact, but personally I wouldn’t know.

Book research and author photos are fun! No, really!

Hearthcraft Book Update

Total word count, hearthcraft book: 33,394
New words today: 2,356

Hearth deities and spirits, mostly, and four pages of automatic writing (which needs to be severely rewritten and inserted in the first and second chapters) about the concept of home-based spirituality (like what it is, and why it’s important). These are what I’ve been struggling with: they’re key to the book, and I understand what they are, but it’s hard to put it into words. It’s a start.

I’ve also been copying files from my hard drive onto my new external hard drive (500 GB! — more than six times the size of my primary hard drive!) as a backup. It now houses all my music files, plus backups of my photos and all my documents. It’s been taking a long, long time, because my USB ports on the computer itself are old enough that they’re first generation, which means my super-speedy external hard drive is being restricted to the speed of the very-not-speedy old USB ports. The copying has been taking up a lot of the computer’s brain, so things have been very slow in general today. It’s taken three days overall to copy all the stuff I’ve got.

I received three books in the mail today, all of which I have been waiting for for one reason or another. Much will be the curling up to read and make notes.

Hearthcraft Book Update

Total word count, hearthcraft book: 31,038
New words today: 3,000

I would call this experiment of HRH taking the car and dropping the boy off on his way to work a success, yes?

(What I am actually screaming inside is, ‘PAST THE HALFWAY MARK! GO ME!‘)

I think we’ll try to split the driving days, so he only has to drive in twice a week and the boy doesn’t have too many nine-hour days at daycare. The caregiver has cheerfully agreed to add the boy to her regular Thursday crowd (bless her!) so I’m set for a four day writing week for the next six weeks. They won’t all be 3K days, of course. I was making a particularly determined effort today to hit the halfway mark.

More cauldron stuff, metals, fire as sacred, defining sacred and spiritual (that was first, taking a large chunk of the day, and wasn’t ultimately that much of the daily word yield, and it got me all muddled because really, how do you define that sort of thing?), and a ritual. I seem to be slogging around in the three introductory chapters, mainly because they define what the book and the path are all about, and a lot of it is vague and hard to pin down. Once they’re in some semblance of order I’ll be able to turn to the later chapters with a better footing.

Pizza as a reward tonight! As much as I would like it to be my homemade pizza I do not have meat or mushrooms for it. I’ll get some tomorrow with the general grocery order. For now, it is good order-in pizza. And I’m off to eat it!