Daily Archives: October 29, 2006

ESTC: Oh Dear

I knew this would happen.

Current word counts stands at 48,879 and the pages number 203 (down from 205 a couple of moments ago; more merciless cutting). I’ve just finished working on Chapter 6, which still needs a bit of smoothing out, but Liam just woke up and we need to get ready to go out to a birthday party (where on earth is HRH? — this could be a problem).

There must be more merciless cutting because the rest of what needs to be expanded/included won’t fit into 1,125ish words.

Am I going to have to start keeping more than 10K words free before the final stages, in order to have enough room to clarify, expand, and polish? I thought I was overbudgeting at 8.5K free for a 50K book, but apparently not.

Eek.

I suddenly have a very, very bad feeling that all the stuff in Chapter 5 that I spent writing and expanding these past two days (basic instructions and reviews of meditation, circle casts, sacred space, etc) are going to have to be excised to make room for the more specialised stuff. Which means, in essence, I’d be tossing out a day and a half of work.

::headdesk::

Liam Update

New sentence yesterday: “Cello? See cello?”

It took a while to follow up on the “Mama car?” phrase he said to his caregiver a couple of months ago, one afternoon when he decided it was time to go home and thus I should magically show up in our vehicle to whisk him away, but we now have more proof of linking two ideas in a phrase. Yay Liam!

Oh — and of course I took the cello out so he could see it. He’d clearly asked for it, after all.

Now if he could just get the meals/eating anything/napping/wakeup time settled back to normal after the gastro upset it all, things would be ducky.

More new words: “banana”, “Pooh”, and I keep forgetting to share the coolness of having Liam totally in love with owls. He calls them “AH-whuls!” (complete with strong emphasis on first syllable, and exclamation mark). He was particularly in love with my stuffed snowy owl known as Fflewddur Fflam, calling to get it down from the top shelf where it sits, but the pleather on the feet began to flake off so I hid it, and now he plays with my classic Pooh stuffed Owl instead. His use of “Plss” and “Ta” are also now more correct, thank goodness.