Category Archives: Writing

Wednesdays

While for other people it’s the middle of the week, it’s just another day for me. There’s bread rising, I need to go out and collect the tomatoes that are falling off the vines, and I should eat something. There’s a cello lesson tonight, too.

I discovered this morning that the Rock Band USB mic is actually recognized by the Mac, and records the cello. Unfortunately, it’s a mono mic and the sound is awful. But what I did discover by listening to the playback is that my sound is too timid most of the time. If I want it to sound better, I have to go all out; no holding back, giving notes their full value, especially before a rest, and so forth. Vibrato! Positions to avoid open strings! The whole nine yards.

In unrelated Apple news, I would like my Touch to actually connect to the internet when it says it’s connected.

It was cool enough this morning that I turned off the A/C and opened all the windows to let air move through the house. So much cooler, right away. The A/C and strategically-placed fans can only do so much for so long.

Twenty pages got edited yesterday. I found one last [write this bit] that I’d forgotten about, and that’s the last one in the book. Then I go back to trying to find a good hook to open with. I wrote a new prologue and a new opening page for the first chapter last week; let’s see if they’re still any good when we get to that point again.

Yawn

Yeah, I know. The Court’s a bit boring these days. If I’m here, I’m tired and uninspired. If I’m away, well, I’m away.

I made homemade bruschetta with pearl onions and tomatoes right out of the back garden last week. Piled it on freshly baked focaccia and couldn’t stop eating it. That ended up being dinner for me. I used Lu’s recipe, roughly, but used lime juice in place of the red wine vinegar. I don’t think I put any herbs in at all. Just tomatoes and onions that tasted like sun, plus sea salt, the olive oil, and freshly ground pepper.

The editing/second draft work on Orchestrated continues apace. I’m at the Oh Noes Accident And Hospital part of the story, which means I think I’ve bridged all the [write this bit here] gaps that I needed to bridge. I’ll find out as I continue on, but I seem to remember everything being pretty straightforward from this point to the end. This could, of course, be an entirely falsified memory cleverly crafted by my subconscious in order to maintain sanity.

With the air conditioner installed as of last Saturday morning, we are blessedly free of the high heat and humidity warnings that are piling up. And as an added bonus, I no longer hear the landscaping crews and power tools working outside. We were trying to make it through the summer without installing it, and really, we did very well. The summer has been cooler than usual, but apparently the weather’s making up for that with a vengeance. Yesterday around six o’clock the thermometer in full sun on the back porch read 42 C/106 F, and that was before factoring in the humidity. (Putting in the A/C unit two weeks before September. What is this world coming to?)

Camping last weekend was lovely. There was plenty of tree cover to shade us from the sun and a very good fire pit on our site, which ended up being the central gathering area for everyone. Lovely new people; and so the (co!)coven grows. The only bad part of the experience was arriving to find the fire pit still smoldering, which means the people who used it before us weren’t responsible. The not sleeping well and waking up in lots of pain wasn’t great either. But everything else was enjoyable. There were many marshmallows roasted.

My spinning wheel still has not arrived. I am antsy and cranky about it, as we are rapidly coming up on a month since I ordered it. I was hoping to have it by Saturday, as that’s when we’re heading out to the Fearsranch in Alexandria for an overnight, and both Fearsclave and his Wicked Old Step-Mother want to see it. Of course, the WOSM has just gone out and bought her own gorgeous double-drive double-treadle Schacht-Reeves Saxony wheel, so we may end up geeking out together over hers instead of mine, as was the first plan, or comparing the wheels, which was the second plan.

I have a cello lesson tomorrow night. I need to play for a while today.

This is the boy’s final week of part-time preschool. As of next Monday he is full-time, which means this Thursday is his last day with the caregiver, and Friday is his last weekday at home. We’re going to go see Ponyo together to mark the occasion.

So yeah. Not very exciting, here. Mostly tired, with a side of exhausted.

It’s Friday…

… which probably means something. Except it doesn’t, because I work at home. Not that I can do that today, as the boy is home with us due to rescheduling, and grr. It’s been one of those Days of Broken Ears, you know? That frustrates me more than outright naughtiness does, somehow. (Although this morning’s episode in the car of rolling down the window and then asking if he could do so was outright naughty, because he can’t roll the window back up on his own. “But I did ask! I asked at the end!” he protested when I reamed him out. Not on my watch, kid. Do it without first asking again and your seat’s going back in the middle of the backseat, where you can’t see out the windows properly.)

The hallway looks spectacular. The colour is a dark cappuccino, and HRH redid all the white trim that chipped off (yeah, not such great quality) when we used the baby gates as well. It’s the colour I’ve been seeing in my mind for the past four years instead of the washed-out-milk-with-a-drop-of-coffee-in-it with a chalky finish that was up there. I hated that finish; you couldn’t wash it, because any swipe with a damp cloth left swathes of permanent colour-change. Very frustrating.

It’s back to school season, and I’ve somehow completely disconnected from it this year. We walked into a department store this week and were attacked by Back To School!!! stuff, and I kind of shrugged and said, Oh, that time of year? It’s probably partly to do with the weather and its not-very-summery-ness. But otherwise, meh. Maybe getting the Mac and the Touch last month assuaged my new-school-supplies need for the year.

We officially have tomatoes. Two plants broke, but HRH rescued the fruit and they’re ripening on the shelf outside.

And… my contributor’s copy of Out of the Broom Closet arrived this morning! It’s a very handsome book and I’m so pleased with it. I’m not going to do a hero shot; I’ll wait for the box of author’s copies to do that.

We’re leaving tomorrow for an overnight camping trip with out local covens, which should be nice and relaxed. (Do you hear that, world? Nice and relaxed.) I handle organization of the two other annual local co-coven events, so this one I told others to handle. Other than offering to bring the camp stove/BBQ, a sack of corn on the cob, and outlining a menu for lunch, it’s someone else’s show/lists/booking/schedules, for which I am grimly thankful. All I have to do is show up and camp. Besides participating in rituals, that is. And any rit I don’t have to write or run these days is a good one; I am so burnt out doing that and the organization thing.

Right; they boy has shut himself in his room to read on his bed. I will try to take advantage of this by working some more on Orchestrated. Yesterday there were about twenty pages edited, and three new ones appeared. I found a decent timer app for Macs that helped immensely; I set it for five minute intervals and realized that by giving myself a five-minute minimum, I was also giving myself permission to write past five minutes. I found myself restarting the timer over and over. Also, the day seemed to go very slowly for some reason, which helped a lot.

Right. I have just been asked for crackers and cheese. That, then work.

In Which She Talks About Things Other Than Spinning Wheels

Yesterday Ceri and I knocked about various places, and it was a most enjoyable day. We had a late breakfast and then headed out to Daisy Antiques, a place my mother and I used to visit regularly when I was a kid. Not much has changed, and certainly not Daisy herself; she looks exactly the same way she did when I last saw her twenty years ago.

Ceri and I had great fun climbing all over the multi-floor shop with its never-ending series of rooms filled with lovely things. We saved the wraparound porch for last, because that’s where the antique spinning wheels were. (The porch was always the best part when I was a kid, too.) And with a bit of poking and jury-rigging we dragged them out and tested all four (well, one wasn’t testable beyond treadling because the spindle was broken) and found them all in remarkably decent shape. They’d all need work before they could be used, of course; proper drive bands made for them, sanding down or filling in of gashes on bobbins, oiling and replacing of the bands or cups holding the spindle assembly, tensioning knobs replaced, flyer hooks straightened or replaced, and so forth. But they were all pretty solid. And the price was attractive, too; Daisy said they were all around $350, but she’d sell them for two.

Then I paid for a 1927 copy of Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill I’d found on a shelf upstairs; I couldn’t pass it up because when I picked it up it fell open to the page with “A Tree Song” on it (and somehow I haven’t managed to read it, and it occurs to me that I don’t think I actually own any Kipling, how odd). Daisy began talking to us about books and she took us into a locked room where she had some gorgeous little books dating from the late 17th century. Ceri and I petted them and cooed over them. And as Ceri was wearing her Great Sax t-shirt, Daisy asked if she played, and the conversation turned to music. It seems that Daisy’s son is a pro sax player.

The things one learns, really.

Daisy also talked to us about estate sales. I think she’d seen and heard us being appreciative of the things we saw and the history they held as we wandered around the shop “Have you ever been to one?” she asked. No, we hadn’t we said, and she said, “Oh, they’re great fun.” A great way to pick up housewares and furniture and books at very good prices, she said, because the point of the sale is to clear the house, not to get the best price one can for them. She has one coming up in my borough in the next couple of weeks, so she gave us her card and told us to watch her website. It sounds like fun; we’ll see if we’re in town for it.

After heading out to Ariadne we had lunch together in the little tea shop behind the quilting store in Pointe-Claire village, and then I had to flee in order to try to get the day’s work finished. The service at lunch was very slow, which didn’t help.

Over lunch, Ceri and I talked about Worldcon (she’s not going either, which relieves me and makes me feel less guilty about choosing to miss it), and we touched on different things about writing and process and general approach. And I thought of two ways I could start Orchestrated, and Ceri suggested a different spin for one of them, so after the boy was in bed and I’d had a bath I curled up in bed with my notebook and wrote out two possible openings for it. Reading Graham Swift’s Making an Elephant was inspirational, too. There were a couple of turns of phrase in it that sent my mind off in new directions and pulled the what-if along a different route. It was nice to be interested in it again.

And now, out for lunch and groceries and bank and stuff.

In Which She Makes A Regretful Discovery

So this past week, I remembered that hey, wow, Worldcon is coming up! And the only reason I remembered was because we realized that the trip to Nova Scotia is rapidly approaching, and Worldcon starts the day before we come back. This tells me something important.

Now, we didn’t buy our memberships ahead of time; money was tight, and since we were going to miss at least a day we figured we’d buy weekend or day passes. And then we waited because I wanted to see what the schedule would be like, so I’d be sure to buy the pass for the day I wanted most. And the schedules were only recently finalized, which drove me nuts, although I’ve participated in large-event organization before and I know how hard it is to pin this stuff down early.

Except now the time’s almost upon us, and I’m slowly realizing something. The only reasons I want to go to Worldcon are:

1. The biggest damn F/SF industry party is going to be IN MY TOWN and to miss it would be just stupid. I’m never going to get to travel to one anywhere else.

2. I want to attend signings of a handful of authors.

And really, that’s it. And can I really afford to pay for passes when I’m not going to really do anything? (Really.)

I was much more excited about Worldcon last year. The excitement has really faded until now, a couple of weeks before the convention itself, I’m at the point where I can’t be bothered about it. And I feel guilty about it, because, well, see item 1 above.

As a corollary, I present opposing arguments:

1. I hate large gatherings of people, with a biting, burning passion.

1a. I hate meeting new people.

2. We have no friends coming into town for the event that we’d be wanting to spend time with there.

3. My areas of writing have moved out of F/SF and into mainstream, specifically YA mainstream. (Okay, there’s the Pandora book which is urban fantasy, but it’s the exception that proves the rule.)

It’s kind of telling when the workshops/panels/ sessions that interest me the most are two or three of the signings, the knitting circle and the spinning workshop, the bookbinding/conservation workshop, and a panel on YA or folklore or music here and there. I don’t absolutely need to go to these; I’d be going to them because they’re being offered and I’d need to do something because I’d paid to get in. That’s the wrong reason entirely.

It’s a lot of money for something I’m not passionate or excited about. And it’s hard on the heels of driving home from NS, too. I know what my decision is going to be, unless something major happens to change it.

Let’s Try Again

Lost an entire post just now. That hasn’t happened in quite some time.

Five loads of laundry yesterday. Five. That’s significant, right?

Apart from that, I managed to edit a whole eight pages of Orchestrated despite having the file open for hours. I’ve hit Part Two, wherein I’ve left myself notes in the text like [write dinner scene here] because I was intent on getting the damn skeleton of the story down and done with. This means my light edits/rewrites are turning into more substantial rewrites, meaning my already slow pace is about to turn into the speed boasted of by turtles. The fibro-fog isn’t helping; I have little focus.

Yesterday I also began re-ripping the missing albums that iTunes can’t/won’t find. Turns out a few of my CDs were originally ripped into .wma format, and iTunes on the Mac doesn’t have an import/convert .wma function. Not a big deal, really. It’s just that I’m trying to find where iTunes is ripping them to, and I can’t. All the logical places I look haven’t turned anything up. (The Mac: “Just trust me. Everything’s going to be fine.” Me: “I know, I know, it’s magic, but even when doing magic I like to know what the ultimate destination for my energy is, thank you very much.”) I want all my music in one place so that I can back it all up at once.

Speaking of the Mac, it doesn’t have a formal name yet. My PCs all had names drawn from Norse mythology — Freyja, Valhalla, Bifrost, the Dell laptop is Nehelennia — but I suspect the Mac has energy that’s more Egyptian in nature. The Wii is named Isis; I think perhaps this is Nephthys, although Ma’at is tempting. I’ll think about it some more. (The Touch may be Nephthys, actually, making this one Ma’at. Hrm.)

Pursuant to the spinning obsession, I found a used Louet S15 on eBay that was listed at a $50 opening bid and comes with a bulky flyer included, so I calculated shipping, looked at my budget, and bid on it. I’m currently winning, but if someone tops my highest bid within the next five days I can still add another twenty dollars before I hit my self-imposed max total of $200. Seeing as how a new wheel would cost me $400 at the least for the very basic entry-level models, $200 including shipping is decent indeed. If I win the damn thing my brain could give over the RAM it’s currently devoting to wheel research and reviews to things that need it, like planning dinner and actual work, instead of constantly returning to the wheel thing when it ought to be thinking of other issues. Actual spinning would be more relaxing and have tangible yield for the time invested than obsessive wheel research online (actual yield = time missing, nothing concrete accomplished, lots of info buzzing in the brain, irritation at the to-do list not diminishing). I know that realistically if I win the wheel, the Obsessive Research slot will be assigned to fibre. But I’m doing that already as part of the overall wheel research thing, so I am being optimistic about the possibility of some leftover RAM.

Huh. There is a ladybug on my office wall. I saw something crawling and did that hiccup of panic, thinking it was a spider, before I looked and saw that it was in fact a Coccinellid. She’s now crawling up the copper deer painting HRH did for me five years ago, and settling down in the knotwork:

Right. I need some Excedrin for this headache, and then it’s back to Orchestrated.

Catching Up

I managed to revise thirty-nine pages of Orchestrated today. Go me! Also spent some of the day backing up files and such, because tonight is the night that I go to view and probably buy the Mac mini! Oh, new computer, you have only been, what, three years in the planning? No more scrounging something together from old computers downstairs! You will be under warranty! The idea is positively intoxicating.

Yesterday in the mail I got a gift certificate to my local yarn shop, purchased for me by my lovely and thoughtful editor! And today I made my appointment to go test drive the two Louet wheels they have (well, one is the shop’s, the other belongs to one of the owners). So on Thursday, that is what I will be doing. Very exciting.

Today’s bad thing was my lovely owl plaque developing a hole int he middle of it. It was a museum plaster cast of an Egyptian bas relief of two owls, and it’s hung by a scooped-out bit in the back and a bar across the resulting hollow. I moved the nail it hangs on, and was hooking the plaque over it… and the nail went through the plaque at the thinnest part. I had a horrible moment of kneejerk despair, and then I breathed again and put it down gently. Perhaps HRH can fill it in, or at least help me find a paint that matches the sort of buff-colour finish of the plaster, so we can drybrush over the white plaster that’s showing around the hole where it all crumbled; maybe the hole will be less noticeable then. It’s right in the middle of one of the owls, though.

Boy needs to go to bed!