Daily Archives: September 7, 2006

ESTC Update

This is horrible:

Like the thorns of a rose, there is beauty and there is pain; each is a part of the other.

Bah. I am descending into purple prose. I’m going to go lie down and read source material for a while in hopes of shaking it.

The other stuff I’ve written today is decent enough for a first draft, though, and I wrote five new pages in Chapter Eight. I’m at 22,003 words (a thousand words beyond where I need to be by the end of Friday, hurrah!), and that’s a good thing because once I settle down to read for inspiration I don’t think I’ll be coming back here to work before I go pick up the boy.

So, for the sake of record:

Total word count, ESTC: 22,003
Total words today: 1,365

Zokutou word meterZokutou word meter
22,003 / 50,000
(44.0%)

How To Write A Book, By Authors

I meant to link Maureen Johnson’s How To Write A Book when I read it, but it got lost in the whole new contract-work-boy-trip thing. It wasn’t until I read her sequel to it a day or so ago that I realised I’d completely forgotten to link it originally. So here you are:

Maureen Johnson on how to write a book, Part 1 and Part 2.

Justine Larbalestier lays her method out here. (Check the spreadsheet! OMG!)

More authors are leaping on the bandwagon. Stay tuned.

eBear shares her methods

Potpourri

My router is suspiciously subdued today. I think it heard me threatening to smash it, and has been cowed into more appropriate behaviour.

I think of all sorts of deepish things to muse about in journal entries as I lie in bed falling asleep, and then when I get to the keyboard the next day I can’t remember a single one of them. Maybe I wanted to talk about how it seems as if with a turn of the calendar page from August to September, fall arrived: cooler temperatures, sleeping with the window almost fully closed at night, the need to wear socks and therefore loafers again. I’m mildly irritated that I didn’t even get to wear the four new camisole t-shirts I bought in early August, back during the last humid heatwave. Or maybe it was something else about clothes, such as how those new smallest-ever size jeans I got in July are now too big for me somehow, after washing them twice. I’d like to have clothes that fit properly; I don’t think it’s too much to ask from life. I think I need to re-evaluate my personal style, too, since I look at most of the clothes in my drawers and go “meh” a lot of the time. (This may have something to do with the fact that my clothes last forever, so I don’t buy clothes very often. Plus I’m not a fan of fashion in general. The contents of my drawers date back from an average of about six years ago.)

I have no idea what I’ll wear for the signing on Saturday. A t-shirt and jeans won’t exactly cut it, and all my good pants are a size too big for me. Oh, there’s a cord skirt I got to wear all of once before I got pregnant, and if I wear my brown sweater with it then I can dig out my funky brown cord lace-up boots, too. Well, there we are, then. Assuming I’m in the right kind of mood on Saturday, that is. I reserve the right to change my mind depending on how I feel when the time comes to get ready.

Since none of last night’s deep thoughts are making a comeback, I tell you instead that I bid farewell to the medium auburn hair I had all summer as a result of the highlights my stylist put in in mid-April. Since my hair is a mess of curls, no streak stays well-defined as a streak; they merge with the rest of my hair, creating a blend between my base colour and the highlight, which in turn lightened through exposure to sun and wind. It was a lovely colour and I enjoyed it for the summer, but I was never fully convinced it looked quite right. So today I coloured it all a basic mid-brown (and let me take a girly moment to say that Garnier 100% Color is the best product I’ve ever used in terms of ease of application, because my hair is usually nightmarish to get hair dye through and this went on in moments). It’s a mild relief to be a proper brunette once more.

All right. I’ve had lunch, there’s tea, I’ve eased back into writing by journaling… let’s see how much I can get done on the last two chapters of ESTC.