Category Archives: The Boy

Swan Sister Update

Today was the first day in the new writing schedule, and look:

Total word count, Swan Sister: 8,771
Total words today: 853

I started to write at 8:20. Liam woke up at 9:00, effectively ending the session. But before I stopped I’d managed to successfully kill off the title character, as set forth in my outline. So that’s the proposal done, and the death done. I can check two major things off my list, and the story can continue to advance. I’m really settling into the style more comfortably too, which is a relief after having it dissolve through the typed words like mist whenever I thought I’d hit it.

Mind you, today’s success may have had something to do with how long I was awake before I sat down to write. I woke up at 5:30 AM, thanks to a wretched cold that has ambushed me and taken my sinuses and my throat hostage. So I was very awake, and had been for some time, and had had time to think about how to handle the scene (plus draw a map to clear up what was where, which had to be done as well). We’ll see if it all still works when I sleep in till sevenish like I usually do.

But establishing a writing schedule again is a Good Thing, not just for my creative sanity but because it looks like I’m dusting off and rewriting the old spellcrafting through the seasons proposal that was “nice but not now” when I originally did it a couple of years back, as well as drawing up an idea for a series (not all by me, of course, but I’d like to do one title for it). It’s so very nice to be asked, “What do you feel like writing?”

Swan Sister Update

How long has it been since I’ve posted a book update? Long enough that I’m practically turning somersaults as I write this.

Total word count, Swan Sister: 7,911
Total words today: 3,071

I love Mousme with much love, for having her here while I wrote meant that I dragged my clunky little laptop out of the closet instead of working with the desktop, recopied my files to a second floppy that worked in the laptop, and wrote all day instead of fiddling around on the internet or with photo files or music or other shiny things that distract me.

It was Liam’s day at his grandma’s, and I deliberately planned a writing jam so that I couldn’t do anything else but write — no errands, no naps, no kicking about. I wrote/thought about/planned/discussed the novel all day. Between elevenish and fiveish I was a writer again, even during the breaks for food and discussion and phone calls and visitors. And ye gods, it worked. I almost doubled my existing word count. I wrote the proposal scene that I couldn’t write until I had at least two straight hours to handle it, and now things are moving in the story. I now have writing momentum, too. I want to keep going.

All I needed was an uninterrupted day doing it and the discipline of someone with me to get that scene written in its entirety. Now I think I can count on the hourish nap Liam has in the early morning to keep writing this book scene by scene. Instead of doing the correspondence/newsreading thing when I turn the computer on, I’ll write as much as I can for as long as his nap lasts, and I’ll handle e-mail and such during his second shorter nap. I will unplug the modem so that I can’t just hop online and lose half an hour. I may go back to writing on the laptop in another room, if that’s what gets the job done. It doesn’t matter how slow the laptop is if it’s not used for anything except word processing. The smaller regular keyboard is a bit hard to use after using the ergonomic board exclusively for a few years, but it’s a challenge I can handle.

Today has been such a blessing, and such a gift.

Although, I’d forgotten how much tea I go through during a writing jam. I haven’t had this much caffeine running through my body in almost two years.

Wednesday Morning

Slept acceptably well. Woke up in a slightly better mood. We shall see what the day brings.

HRH and the car are off at the garage, theoretically making everything better.

The humidity is already stifling, and the humidex is supposed to hit 42 Celsius today. There had better not be any obstacles to the car being fixed, because there’s a trip out to get ice cream in my future this afternoon, yes indeed, or else.

Luanna called last night and made me envy her all the more for studying groovy book stuff. I’ve never been so grateful to hear anyone say “Scholastic” and “Anansi Press” in such an excited voice. I miss that part of being in the book trade. My position is completely different now.

The only thing that comes close to receiving cool mail is sending cool mail out and hearing back that people are receiving it.

Oh: Liam has finally learned to wave. Now he waves at everything.

Silver Linings

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.

A Big Adventure

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.

Observations

When I have had two glasses of my father’s Pinot Grigio on a relatively empty stomach, I can play Bach’s first solo cello suite with remarkable skill. Go me. (Yes, it’s all about getting the inner critic tipsy. And mostly off-topic, I have recently discovered that my inner critic is a sad pathetic self-defeating Muppet monster like one sees on Sesame Street.) And damn, those new strings really, really sound smooth. Honestly, everything I’ve read about steel strings and everything I’ve ever learned about how my cello sounds in the past eleven (eleven!?) years completely and totally contradicts how remarkably smooth and even they sound, particularly in transition from one string to another. It takes less effort to pull good sound out, and the strings respond almost immediately. It makes me wonder how I worked with my last synthetic set for so long. Of course, they were also two years old, so they’d stretched and lost some of what makes them work they way they’re supposed to, and since I hear the instrument all the time I don’t notice the gradual loss of quality. My intonation is more accurate with these new strings, too, a precious little bonus for which I’m deeply grateful.

Liam tripped and (a) bit the inside of his lip and (b) cut the outside on something this morning. First blood! He’s fine; now the lower lip’s a little swollen and both cuts are visible, but after the initial “my mouth is full of blood and it stings!” he forgot about it. As a treat I put his special Sunday oatmeal (with a whole grated apple stirred in and cinnamon sprinkled on top) in his Nana’s Bunnykins porringer.

Liam, of course, was more interested in the dish than in eating what it held.