Creativity, like a goat, doesn’t CARE if it’s eating Beluga caviar or deep-fried Twinkies. On some very basic level, it can’t even tell the difference.
Sarah Monette on the alchemy of writing over at Glass Cats, the journal examining the writer’s craft that she shares with Elizabeth Bear.
There’s more, of course. There almost always is.
No new words on Swan Sister today — I worked on writing proposals and did proposal-related research instead — but I forgot to post my new updates from Wednesday, so here:
Total words, Swan Sister: 11,954
Total new words, this past Wednesday: 741
HRH and I went to see Cars this afternoon, and it was brilliant, it really was. When we saw the original trailer long ago we kind of looked at one another and said, “Um, as genius as Pixar is, we really can’t see how this will work.” We’re very happy to be wrong. Liam will love it when we get the DVD, because there are an incredible number of wheel shots in the first eight minutes alone
I think my brain now switches off around eight at night. Long gone are the days when I could work till eleven. It’s a pity, because the evenings could be prime writing time. Ah well.
I had too many caffeinated beverages today and not enough real food to balance it. I’m going to have to have a rather large warm milk with vanilla (possibly two) and go to bed with a book. But first, laundry. My life is really too exciting.
Putting on Invisible’s Zombie Chickens Live! at a highish volume goes a long, long way towards counteracting a bad mood. A half-glass of Dad’s Pinot Grigio helps too. (It’s a half glass because I only have one bottle left and I’m making it last as long as I can…)
I shouldn’t be surfing in a mood like this because I want to order lots and lots of books. Online ordering is so seductively simple, curse it.
So very cranky. It started yesterday around Liam’s bedtime, and it hasn’t gone away. Every time anyone says anything I feel as if I’m going to snap, for absolutely no reason.
The mechanic can’t do anything about the car till Wednesday morning.
However, there’s a house Liam and I pass on our way to the river whose front yard is completely covered in lily of the valley, and they’re all in bloom now. You can smell it a block away. Heavenly.
And I’ve just learned via a sidebar note on SciFi Wire that Helena Bonham Carter will be playing Bellatrix Lestrange in The Order of the Phoenix.
Yesterday we had A Big Adventure. We took the bus and metro downtown to the bookstore.
Since the car is down for the count we couldn’t implement our original plan for the day, which was to pick up earth and plants and finally get the garden in, or go get groceries, or do anything that required carrying things. But it was a beautiful day, and I had a coupon for a one-day discount at Indigo. Liam had never been on public transport before, and I’ve been leery of trying it without backup, so to speak, in case things went horribly awry. I happened to have a handful of bus tickets, so away we went.
He loved it. So many people to see! So many people to talk to him! When we got downtown we stopped in at a Second Cup so that HRH and I could have frozen hot chocolates (every bit as good as I remembered) and we could give Liam his lunch. He was so excited that he only ate half his usual lunch, but gladly accepted a bottle afterwards. Then we walked to the bookstore, and even though I read books to him and let him turn pages, he got cranky when I wouldn’t let him chew on them. It was around his afternoon nap time, and his two morning naps had been very short, so I’d sort of expected something of the sort to occur eventually. When I’d chosen books for his birthday presents HRH took him on a walk around the store while I pulled out my list and did a rapid check for the books I wanted to pick up for myself. The Jim Butcher wasn’t in stock (wah!) BUT the new Charles de Lint, Widdershins, was out, a lovely surprise as it hadn’t been listed as available when I’d last checked the website. So I snatched that up, plus The Greenstone Grail by Amanda Hemingway, a book that had a good review in a recent issue of Locus, plus Conrad’s Fate, the newest Chrestomanci book in paperback (yay Diana Wynne Jones! but the new cartoony covers for Howl’s Moving Castle and Castle in the Air are dreadful, whose idea were those?). All those books that he wasn’t allowed to touch really pushed Liam past his limits, though, so that was that.
We headed for home, and gave Liam another bottle on the metro as he was hitting that glassy-eyed tired stage. He fell asleep just before we reached the terminus, and slept the rest of the way home. All in all it was a remarkable success. Sure enough, my concerns about the metro were realised: to reach the platform you have to go up or down stairs, and our smaller stroller is still bulky enough to make this sort of thing difficult. The bus, however, is a breeze, particularly as we’re near the beginning of the route, so now I’ll feel perfectly comfortable taking him to the grocery stores or the shopping centres around here.
The phone battery gave out yet again when I was talking to my mother last night. I’m going to look into buying a new battery, as it’s happening with increasing frequency.
Yes! Car trouble is precisely what I need just now!
If we were scheduled to do anything with you in the next 48 hours or so, consider it off. Two of the cylinders aren’t firing and there’s a dodgy little spark doing odd stuff where it oughtn’t. To the mechanic it goes on Monday.
On the sunnier side of life, it seems that we wrote a song today. Or rather, we finally got down to setting chords to the lyrics that ai731 wrote last (eep) August. So now a vocal melody and guitar solo can follow. Yay us.
Now I have to polish the one I wrote at the beginning of the month so it scans properly, and then we can set chords for that too.
Thanks to my wonderful mother in law, HRH and I got to play hooky for about four hours today.
X3 was… disappointing. The storyline vanished halfway through the film. Characterisation and motivation were non-existant. The scriptwriters should be shot for what they passed off as dialogue. On the other hand, there was action. A bunch of it, in fact. If I’d cared about any of the characters, I’d have enjoyed the action more.
Other than that, I mailed out a pile o’ stuff and finally got to deposit a cheque. I also tried to put a CD into my safe deposit box only to discover that it didn’t fit, even without the case; the disc is about five millimeters too wide. Argh! Looks like I’ll be buying a flash drive for this instead.
All in all, though, the day was a good one. And we had a bit of sushi for dinner, because it’s been a long hard week — no, a long hard two weeks — for both of us.