Category Archives: Cogging for Kibble

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: 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!

Head, Meet Desk

Remember when I said The next time I see this should be when the Fed Ex delivery person hands me the box of page proofs?

The project manager separated the overall editor-review-edit from the copy-edit. I have to handle the copy-edit in two weeks.

I have a book to hand in a month and a half from now, a book that is going very slowly due to circumstances that are pretty much beyond my control. I may have to add an extra day to Liam’s daycare schedule every week instead of every two weeks if I’m going to lose a week to handling copy-edits.

On the somewhat more optimistic side of things, I can see the manuscript beginning to come together in some sort of odd way. It’s almost as if different portions of it are filling out or inflating into a somewhat recognisable shape, while other parts are still dead and flat. I need more of it to be alive so that I can connect more dots and deepen the exploration.

It’s not alive yet. That’s the problem. And I don’t know how to fix it. At some point it will magically happen, and then things will flow and connections will spider through the manuscript of their own accord, but until then every day is a slog uphill, pushing a ball of jumbled words and loose letters.

Reissue News!

I just received a message from my editor at Provenance Press. She told me that The Way of the Green Witch is selling steadily (hurrah!) and that they’re reissuing it with a new cover!

I can’t tell you how thrilled I am about this. Hearing that a book is selling steadily is always good news, but to hear that the cover is being redone made my week. I am less than fond of the Way of the Green Witch cover; I was disappointed with it when they showed me the final version and suggested several other possibilities, including some of the very different original cover they proposed for it, but without success. The new cover is being finalised right now, and as soon as I have a picture of it I’ll post it. I’m so excited!

My editor is also pushing for a reissue of Solitary Wicca for Life with a new cover. Updates as events warrant!