Category Archives: Writing

Wasting Time

I am currently doing my best to avoid working. So far it seems to be successful, because now I only have an hour and fifteen minutes left before I have to get ready to leave for lunch with Lady Roo.

Not that I’ve been completely wasting time: I’ve had breakfast, caught up on correspondence (which is a fancy term I use for e-mail both business and casual, filing paper mail, making/taking phone calls, reading news, and tracking info down), and tidied up. I’m just aware that I should open a file and do some writing of some sort, but doing busy-work instead. Busy-work does need to get done at some point, after all.

Look! An hour and ten minutes left! I should see how many words I can get thrown down in an hour. Messy, but good exercise.

Swan Sister Update

I’ve had a remarkably good afternoon.

Total word count, Swan Sister: 22,525
New words today: 1,985

I finally got past the Major Thing that had to happen in order to get the rest of the book going. There’s another plot point that has to happen directly afterwards, but at least now everyone’s in the right place (geographically and character-wise) for it to occur. It’s going to need rewriting later because it’s all over the place, but now there’s something down that makes sense to my characters and to the story as a whole. Plus I have the added bonus of knowing exactly what happens next when I sit down to write.

It feels so good to not only be working on this again, but to have written through the Big Obstacle that has been lurking there since July. (Not that I’ve really had the time or headspace to work on it, what with ESTC and being ambushed by YA historical fiction. But still.)

Using The Force For Good, Not Evil

With things like this happening, if I were Jo Rowling I’d find myself hard-pressed to resist the urge to completely skebard everyone’s expectations by writing something totally unexpected. Alas, unexpected would also mean inconsistent with the way the series has been heading, and being untrue to the story.

But it would be really, really hard to resist the temptation. I’m just saying, that’s all.

Carrots Vs. Word Count

I am intimately familiar with the latter scenario:

I’ve just had a great writing week. There are few feelings more joyous than reading back over the week’s work and thinking ‘that’s not bad at all”, as opposed to the all-too-frequent, ‘it’s rubbish, I’ve wasted a week and I’ll have to re-write the lot.’ And if you think that’s an exaggeration or false modesty, you are very, very wrong. It’s perfectly possible to put in eight hour days and have nothing to show for them but a single idea that, if reworked completely, might be passable.

Jo Rowling, quoted at The Leaky Cauldron.

Actually, taking a couple of weeks off is helping me immensely. I need this distance from the amount of writing I’ve done since the beginning of August.

Woes

Well, the good news is that my editor loves the new version of ESTC, and is sending it along to the next step of the publishing process as well as submitting a delivery payment request.

The bad news is that my computer is dead, thanks to an embedded virus on a CD from a trusted source that initialized as soon as the CD started spinning in the drive . My virus shield caught one virus, I quarantined it, and was accepting the restart command when the shield caught another virus, but too late;the system began its reboot. And now that second virus is hanging the Windows load, and crashing the system between the XP load screen and the login screen.

My in-house tech support talked me through the first couple of options for safe restart before he left on a business trip, but nothing worked; it keeps crashing. He’s now gone and I’m left with a non-functional computer. I have a second hard drive that Jan gave me a while back, which I theoretically can put in the place of the bugged one once it’s reformatted and Windows loaded onto it… except I’ve never done that myself before. In theory I can do this, then set my original hard drive as a slave, run Windows off the new drive, and go in and run my anti-virus program on it manually, but theory and computers rarely seem to co-occupy the same level of reality. I may just wait till he’s home again on Saturday and let him do it.

In the meantime, I have my clunky twelve-year old laptop to write with, and I think the dial-up still works; I haven’t checked it in ages. (Or I could try plugging the router into it, if it even has a slot and the required innards for that.) And I can come downstairs into the basement to use HRH’s computer if necessary, which is where I am now, and I hate this mouse and this keyboard and argh.

I’m thankful I didn’t try to load Dreamweaver onto my computer any earlier than this, because if it killed my system before I’d handed the book in, I think I would have done myself an injury. As it is, this is just really, really annoying. You’ll see much less of me over the next four days, and don’t send me anything vital by email, because I won’t get it.

Cue The Wibbling

The MS for ESTC was just resubmitted. Now I get to worry about how good my tweaks are, on top of how good the book is as a whole.

No, I cannot win.

I do like it, though, I really do. It’s much better than I remember feeling that it was when I first submitted it, so those two weeks gave me a good step back and helped me regain perspective. I’m more confident this time. I still can’t shake the anxious knot between my shoulders, though, but that’s perfectly natural.

I’m going to go for a drive and pick up the boy with HRH, as he’s stopped by on his way there to offer the opportunity.