Daily Archives: November 22, 2006

Novella Update

My plans for the evening were derailed, and I wasn’t happy about it. So I wrote instead.

Total word count, Il Maestro e le Figlie di Coro: 31,629
Total words today: 3,013

And I did another 1,193 last night after Liam went to bed, too. (There, posterity, are you satisfied?)

I’ve been messing about with creating alternate meditations and rituals for two chapters of ESTC. I’m still not wholly certain about them at the moment, but I only started them today so they need time to evolve properly. It remains to be seen if they’ll create the effect I’m still trying to capture. I moved more things around to smooth out the final chapter too, but the eighth chapter is still defying me, possibly because birth is an incredibly spiritual thing to begin with, and to capture it in words is remarkably difficult without sounding either twee or dim.

It’s good to have two so very different projects on the go at once. When I get stuck or bored with one of them, I switch to the other and still get work done. (And don’t kid yourself — this is work. It’s what I do for a living. Some stuff I am fortunate enough to sell as partials, other stuff I need to write out before I can send it out on a quest for a home.)

An Ancient Muse, the new Loreena McKennitt album, is excellent. So is Fragile Things, the latest short fiction collection from Neil Gaiman that I started reading the other day. And in fact, I’m headed for bed to read more of it before I turn out the light.

McKennitt News

To promote her new album An Ancient Muse (which is quite good, although I’m only halfway through it so far), Loreena McKennitt will be appearing at the Galeries Laval location of Archambault (1545 Le Corbusier Blvd, Laval, QC) on December 2 at 14h00. It’s a bit of a commute outside Montreal, but it’s the only appearance she’s doing in the province at the moment. No concert dates have been announced yet, either, but I’m sure there will be.

fps Auction Launches Today!

The fps: the magazine of animation week-long online auction to raises funds for the Canadian Cancer Society goes live today! From today (that’s Wednesday, November 22 for those of you who haven’t checked yet) to Wednesday, November 29, 2006, anyone with Internet access will be able to bid on animation-related items put on eBay by fps.

Click the banner to be taken to the page that lists the items up for auction. The auction page also features a button that will take you directly to a form through which you can make a donation directly to the Canadian Cancer Society via the fps parent company 5×5 Media, if you wish to make a donation without participating in the auction. But hey — if you do participate, you get cool stuff as well as donating to a very worthy cause!

Here’s a sample of what’s available (snitched from the ever-lovely and -talented Kino Kid, as was an earlier sentence, because she is so very good with words):

* Original artwork from Steve Rude, Joel Trussell and Dave Alvarez, donated by the artists
* 2D and 3D animation software from Toon Boom Animation, Softimage, Autodesk, and e frontier
* A signed copy of Amid Amidi’s book, Cartoon Modern: Fifties Animation Design, personalized for the bidder
* A signed copy of Jeff Smith’s Bone Volume One in hardcover
* Anime DVDs, UMDs, CDs, and posters
* Ninja Tune’s ZenTV compilation DVDs, including animated videos from Mr. Scruff and Kid Koala

Please help us spread the word, and to raise funds to help improve the quality of life for those living with cancer.