Monthly Archives: November 2002

Writerly Support

In my regular circle of friends there is a disproportionately large number of NaNoWriMo participants, and most of us got together last night for mutual support. (That proportion is complemented by the frustrated artists, who were not with us. We’re a very creative bunch when we’re given the opportunity.) It’s a good group, and we discussed a lot of really neat stuff while enjoying some good food. One of the things we talked about was the Cheesy Fantasy Epic, which Dez claims writes itself because it’s formula, formula, cliche, formula. Sounds like his material is marketable already! (Don’t mind me, I’ve just worked in the book business for eleven years, and cannot believe the crap that gets published. This of all things assures me that someone I know, if not myself, will be a published author some day, because our worst is still better.)

We discovered things in common, such as people trying to sneak in novel-writing at work while on the phone, people forgetting to eat, working late at night, writing huge blocks less often, and so forth. One of my friends, when we pressed him for his word count, was remarkably stubborn, and he finally admitted that he’d begun a novel and it had hit a brick wall, so after arguing fruitlessly with it for a couple of days he’d abandoned it and begun a new one a day or so ago. We were stunned, but cheered when he told us that he’d written a few chapters already (although he still didn’t share his word count!). It takes guts to abandon something you’ve put time into, even if it’s dead in the water.

Everyone’s optimistic, everyone’s having fun, and the only damper on the evening was when the waitress told us that they had run out of cider.

This morning I teach, my informal Shakespeare reading group reads another play aloud this afternoon (which keeps growing no matter how hard I try to keep a limit to it; if everyone shows up we might have a seating problem!); tomorrow, I will write. I called it quits last night an hour before I had to leave for the meeting; I could have stayed and hacked out more, but I was tired. This left my word count just a thousand shy of half-way to 50K, which was a bit frustrating, but it’s good to know that when I sit down on Sunday that milestone will be passed.

More Teeth-Rotting Kitten Cuteness

Oh, dear gods.

She drinks tea, too.

I have a brand-new wide-mouthed mug with herbs all over it. It fits kitten heads quite nicely, apparently. Kitten heads attached to bodies which evidently like the taste of lukewarm Twinings Lady Grey.

Enough, you cat. Shoo with you. You are distracting me (a) from my freelance work that pays for your kibble, and (b) from my novel.

Go play with your Auntie Maggie, or chase Roman’s tail, or something.

Teeth-Rotting Kitten Cuteness

I’m having a bit of difficulty typing this morning, because there’s a kitten sitting in front of my monitor.

Yes, she has discovered the computer. At first, she just wanted to sit on my lap and purr adoringly. Being with her human was enough. Then, she wanted to see what all the clicks were about. Keyboard; okay. Then, ah then, she happened to look up as I moved my mouse across the screen, and it was love at first sight. Now she climbs from my lap over the keyboard (adding Xs and Ks and the odd Q, deleting other stuff, pulling up a couple of screens I’ve never seen before in my browser) and sits right in front of the monitor, watch my pointer as I navigate, or my whirling propellor “working” icon.

Okay, she’s moved to the stack of NaNo reference book I have piled next to the monitor. Gads, she’s cute. This is teeth-rotting cuteness. You’re lucky I don’t have a digital camera, or it would be, “here’s my kitten being cute”, and “here’s my kitten being painfully adorable”. (Please don’t knock the books over, darling, or you will plummet from cute to gaspingly laughable, and I’m drinking tea, here. That dictionary balanced on the very top may look solid, but it has two mass-market paperbacks underneath it.) She’s managed to lie down so that she can look down and crane her head around the edge of the monitor and watch the words appear on the screen.

Gah. Who needs honey in their tea when they have a kitten?

I’m still working on the seasonal gift list my parents asked me for a couple of weeks ago. I’m terrible at brainstorming a list of stuff I want. Evidently I shall have to take an afternoon and wander through a large bookstore and make notes of what strikes my fancy, and then do the same at a music store. Ikea gift cetificates are always good too, I suppose; inevitably I end up needing at least one more bookshelf per year.

I’m having dinner with Ceri, Marc, and Annika tonight (anyone dares to make a Marc’s Angels joke and they’re toast)… maybe I’ll go downtown a little early and do some browsing. All in the name of finishing these gift lists, of course.

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So there!

My last word count two days ago was around seventeen thousand something, so when I sat down to write for a couple of hours tonight my goal was to hit twenty thousand, and I needed approximately twenty-five hundred words to do it. I was still writing tonight when our friends showed up for our appointed evening of film-watching. I typed furiously at my notebook computer, and finally said, “Okay, please humour me by allowing me to run to my big computer and post my word count.” I was confident. I was satisfied with my achievement. I logged on, grabbed my calculator… and was two hundred words short.

“What?” I cried at the screen.

“Everything okay in there?” my husband called.

“No,” I said through gritted teeth. “My math was off. I don’t know what number I used, but it was the wrong one.”

I logged off and we proceeded to watch Spider-Man, and I was rather impressed. This film just sort of got away from me while it was in theatres. I enjoyed it immensely, apart from the slight issue I had with Peter not telling anyone he’d been bitten by a blue and red spider like those fourteen other genetically altered spiders, you know, the ones where there’s supposed to be fifteen, but one’s missing? We no-prized it by deciding that he was shy, and he’d already been bullied in that scene, so if he said, “Hey, a spider bit me,” the other kids would probably make fun of him: “Oooh, poor baby, did a spider bite him?”

So the film ended, and our friends left, and my husband started turning off lights… and I sat down, determined to hit twenty thousand words before I went to bed.

It’s done.

So there.

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Note to self: when taking a bath to think about your novel, take a pad of paper and a pencil in with you, just in case, so that you can make notes when bombarded with good ideas and perfectly phrased lines.

Words and Music

I avoided my novel yesterday and sat down to do some serious book research, which consisted of going through two novels with an orange highlighter, a pencil, and a pad of sticky notes. Now I can press onwards, confident, using these texts to inspire my protagonist as she makes connections between these novels and the world around her.

That’s why my word count hasn’t budged. That, and practicing, and orchestra.

I’ve had better nights, but I’ve had worse nights, too. Two of our best cellists were missing, so Walter and I were struggling to fill in sound-wise and technique-wise, with our last two cellists alternately playing the bass part (which really threw me off a lot) and attempting the cello line. For some reason I didn’t move up to sit with Walter in the first chair (actually I know exactly what the reason was, it was avoidance of being close to the conductor for the Handel and the Mendelssohn disasters I foresaw looming), so both he and I sat alone, one behind the other, which meant we both felt unsupported because we couldn’t hear anyone else’s line to lend us psychological support. Next week I’ve promised to sit up front with him.

There were good parts (namely the bits I really, really practiced) and bad parts (the bits I practiced but became severely thrown off by the presence of the rest of the orchestra as we passed around the fugue theme of the Handel at breakneck speed). I’m really going to have to buckle down and do some serious work on these pieces in the next week or so. I don’t feel tremendously defeated, however, because there are some bits I can play that no one else can. So you see, I’m not a complete failure, which is a blessed relief, trust me. I still can’t get into the music, though; I’m finding it very difficult to create any sort of positive emotional attachment to it. I’m rather neutral about it all, which bothers me. Music is a very emotional art for me, and if a piece doesn’t make me feel something, I’m going to have difficulty playing it. Technical difficulty is a seperate negative stumbling block for these pieces.

This afternoon I’m going to do a couple of hours of freelance work, then I’ll novelise for a while. Can’t have my fingers losing flexibility, or my creative juices drying up, now, can I? (I believe I used the phrase ‘drooling language all over the page’ in encouragement to a fellow NaNoWriMo, and you know, it’s quite the apt metaphor…)

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A public congrats to Ceri for not only hitting her goal of 8,900 words, but surpassing it for a running total of 9,115.

Yay, Ceri!

I was out last night and I picked up a couple of books that my protagonist examines closely over the course of my novel. I already own copies of these particular books, but there was no way I was going to use them as reference. So, new copies were purchased (I did try to find them second-hand, but five second-hand stores later, I knew I was out of luck) and I brought them home to break them in.

My mother (this is related, honest) trained as a documentation technologist, which is to a librarian as a dental hygenist is to a dentist: they do all the work, and the university graduate gets the credit and the plumper paycheque. One of the things she learned was how to prepare new books for the shelf, and for library binding. She taught me how they do it, and it simultaneously fascinated me and horrified me.

Here’s what you do: you hold your book spine down, find approximately the middle, and crack it open. Yep. Bend that virgin spine to the book lies completely flat. Then choose one side or the other and divide that section in half, and snap it open again, then do the other side. You keep diving the sections in half and snapping them open so finally, the book will flex smoothly and you’ll have no trouble turning pages. As a rule of thumb, there should be a snap every fifty pages or so.

I’m obsessive about my personal library, and in my world, to snap a spine is to break the book. It’s interesting to note that of all the people I used to lend books out to (it doesn’t happen often any more, trust me), those who handed them back with broken spines are no longer in my circle of friends. Hmm. Coincidence? Maybe.

So to sit down last night and snap these spines ruthlessly so I could mark them up with pens and markers and sticky notes was a big step on my part. I mean, I didn’t even do this to my university texts, although I did finally concede defeat and begin making light pencil marks in them. You can see why I had to have second copies, though.

Then I went to bed at about midnight. I woke up at around five (we think) to my husband sitting bolt upright in bed to say, “The power’s out.” Sure enough, I could hear the slow beep of the fire alarm battery in the front hall, which, when you’re still partially asleep, really sounds like a delivery truck backing up. Then he said, “Wow, it’s snowing.” So I pulled the curtain aside, and it was a winter wonderland out there – at least three inches of snow was piling up. “Pretty,” I said, and lay back down.

And then, the realisation that if the power was out for long, there would be no NaNoing today, despite the fact that I had a new adapter for my notebook computer.

Was the power outage city-wide? Would NaNos all over Montreal shake their fists at Hydro-Quebec and wail? Was the problem local, i.e. a snow-laden tree leaning against a power line, or distant, i.e. James Bay has been snowed in? And then, as I fell asleep, a most heartfelt feeling of gratitude for not being caught at the computer when the power failed welled up in my heart.

Although when I woke up at eight the snow had stopped, it’s begun again. My husband the Weather Channel addict tells me that by Saturday it’s supposed to be 13� C again, which means rain and mucky messes for a few days. Ah, November. Changeable, fickle, and you don’t even have the redeeming factor of a holiday in there somewhere….