1,507 new words today. Onward, onward; chipping away at the plot. Maybe four or five chapters left, now.
I feel rushed, because I’m going out tonight and the next two hours are going to be squished full of fetching boy and cooking/eating dinner and getting ready to go. I hate feeling rushed.
Also, whatever’s chewing away at my back can take a hike.
There are 2,316 new words in The Moments of Being Pandora. I wasn’t aware that they were piling up like that. A pleasant surprise, after feeling like I was working uphill all afternoon.
Also, there have been four and a half loads of laundry done. Go me! And two more small meals eaten. Yikes.
After an entire frustrating morning of having my Owldaughter server down, it’s back. A slew of spam has just been released through my site-related e-mail accounts, but not a single bit of e-mail I was hoping for — namely, shiny and effulgent messages of “We loved your editing test, please work for us!” from at least one of the handful of jobs I’ve applied for over the past two weeks.
Teh Sicque is still dogging our steps in this house. After dealing with HRH being under the weather for the past handful of days, and Liam dealing with whatever it is that almost-twos deal with (like molars you can’t yet see and frustration with limits and the desire to brush tiny teeth seven times daily and disinterest in food other than crackers and the need to watch a movie over and over and over again when we’re limiting TV time), I find that today I’m quite tired. Liam’s regular Monday with the caregiver was switched for today, and I’ve done some writing, but it’s going so very slowly and I’m fighting deep physical exhaustion. I’ve eaten twice since breakfast, but I’m still flopsy. I’m loath to go curl up under the afghan and doze because then I’ll feel like I’ve lost the day. I don’t even have a good book to read, although last night I pulled Patricia Wrede’s Snow White Rose Red off the shelf to be reread when I finished the latest Nora Roberts fluff with which I was distracting myself. Actually, I don’t really want to read, which alarms me.
I’m also experiencing stupid little crises centered around how I feel like I’m only pretending to be a real writer, and if I’ve published three books shouldn’t I feel different, and have more to show for it? And if/when my fiction gets published, will that better validate my work in my own eyes? Who knows. The mice in the wheel that powers my brain can take a break, though, because I feel like I’m chasing my own inadequacies in circles today.
If it weren’t minus 33 with the windchill out there, I’d go for a walk to clear my brain, get a drink, and perhaps treat myself to an Easter Creme Egg.
I have no idea what to do for dinner this evening. My meal creativity ran out last night.
Back to work. I’m going to start skipping scenes in Pandora and expanding the ones that exist in note form. I’ll go back and bridge them later, when I have the energy to write transitions properly.
HRH: Home in bed. The gastro has struck back with a vengeance.
Liam: Home. There is unpleasant roommate upheaval at the caregiver’s.
Me: Oh look, a rush editing job just landed in my inbox.
*headdesk*
Thank goodness we had a nice visit with the ADZO crew yesterday to have provided me with some sort of break. Liam discovered sledding and loves it with a violence heretofore reserved only for Mermy and Thomas.
Also: BSG? Well done, destabilising the viewers.
Number of family members the gastro has hit since I succumbed to it Wednesday night: Three.
Number of family members fully recovered: Zero. We’re all still a little off. HRH seems to be the worst off, but it hit him last.
Interest in food in general amongst family members: Zero.
Number of meals we should still eat: All of them. Plus grazing. Except see above.
Annoying conversations with downstairs neighbour in which I was told “you make a lot of noise, you know”: One. This from the woman who lets her alarm clock go off in the morning, loud enough to wake us up, and then leaves it going so we can’t fall back asleep. The woman who vacuums at midnight. The woman who leaves her television on all night. (Her living area is right under our bedroom.) This really, really infuriates me because (a) we are not loud people to begin with, and (b) we go out of our way to live in the front half of the house so that we minimise disturbance in the back half, under which she lives. I am thoughtful; she is not. And we get crap from her? Although HRH told me that apparently she complained about the noise to the landlord when this apartment was vacant before we moved in. And she told me that she heard the baby crying before we had brought him home from the hospital. So it shouldn’t bother me, because she evidently isn’t living in the same reality everyone else is. But it does. The injustice of it has ruined my weekend; I can’t shake my resentment.
Annoying conversations with downstairs neighbour in which I was told “you call my name a lot”: One. Same conversation, actually. This bit rendered me pretty speechless beyond, “Ah, no. No, we don’t call your name. Ever.” More proof she’s not living in the same reality. I don’t know whose voice she’s hearing, but I wish they’d encourage her to relocate.
Number of new movies seen in the past two days: Two. Impromptu, and Howl’s Moving Castle. I appreciated the Miyazaki for its designs and how it interpreted Sophie’s shifting age, but the book by Diana Wynne Jones upon which it’s based is so much better.
Hours spent planning out the end of The Moments of Being Pandora: Four, this past Friday. It was an excellent work day. I’m excited about the story, and I’m looking forward to filling it out now. Swan Sister gets set on a side burner while I make a drive to get a finished draft of Pandora. I’ve already done a basic edit on the existing three-quarters of the book, so another fourish chapters should end it. Then I can look at the entire thing properly as a unit.
Snow in our backyard: Around three feet? It was up to the crossbeams on the swingset when we went to bed after the storm on Friday night; it’s compacted a bit now. Still, that’s a lot of snow. There’s only about a foot of fence showing above it.
Number of time I’ve seen a plough on our street in the past two and a half days: One. Our lovely wide street is now a single lane. The piles of snow at the end of people’s driveways are around eight feet high. Very exciting if you are under fifteen. The removal crews can visit our neighbourhood any time now. They haven’t even touched 90th Avenue.
We’re off for a visit with the ADZO crew this afternoon, or Liam and I are, anyhow, despite the fact that I think it would do HRH good to get out of the house.
This sounds like all I can handle right around now. I’ve been violently ill for the past 24 hours. (Thank the gods I got home from orchestra before it got really bad. It’s been terribly lovely, really; I haven’t been this ill in almost two years. Liam, poor boy, has just begun his own gastro. I’m grateful that mine’s now over, otherwise trying to deal with a toddler being ill while trying to not be ill oneself — no fun.)
Memeage courtesy of Talyesin:
Fun writers’ meme: Post the first line from five works in progress.
I am shocked to discover that I only have four works in progress at the moment, Others have been finished, handed in, submitted, closed, etcetera.
1. The swan reached the end of the pond, turned, and began sailing back. – Swan Sister, of course. Although this is a prologue written to help situate me-the-author, which I’m not sure is going to actually be included in the book or not. If not, then the first line of the first chapter is, When Annah turned sixteen, her father gave her a beautiful palfrey mare.
2. What makes a great novel? – The Poppy book, sometimes known as The Great Canadian Novel.
3. “They found another girl in the scaffetta last night after curfew,†said Guilia, skipping into the dormitory room. – Il Maestro e le Figlie di Coro.
4. There. – The Moments of Being Pandora.
Wow. Maybe it’s because I’ve been doing so much non-fic in the past three years, articles, books, reviews and the like. But only four?
What a beautiful, beautiful early spring day. This is the second day in a row that I have been able to wear my cherry-red polar fleece spring jacket, ignoring my black wool winter coat with great satisfaction.
Appropriately, today we have been spring cleaning. HRH even scrubbed out the closets. I cleaned out the jumble that had collected under the kitchen sink, did some mending, and some general tidying and reorganization in my office.
Which led me, thrillingly, to uncover the location of the 8 x 10″ envelope containing all the postcards and pins and pictures and story cards that decorated my inspirational bulletin board in the last apartment. This is the envelope of precious things that I thought I’d lost in the move, believed gone forever.
In it was — are you ready? — the postcard from Neil Gaiman, the story assignment that I finally wrote last fall. I knew what the line was because I’d journaled it, but I’d thought the card itself never to be seen again. No longer!
Now, off to pick up the boy. And again, I must remember that it is Wednesday, and that I have orchestra. (We’re all off in this house because we came home on a Monday instead of a Sunday, you see, and we are firmly convinced that it is in fact Tuesday.)