Daily Archives: February 8, 2008

Hearthcraft Book Update

Total word count, hearthcraft book: 31,038
New words today: 3,000

I would call this experiment of HRH taking the car and dropping the boy off on his way to work a success, yes?

(What I am actually screaming inside is, ‘PAST THE HALFWAY MARK! GO ME!‘)

I think we’ll try to split the driving days, so he only has to drive in twice a week and the boy doesn’t have too many nine-hour days at daycare. The caregiver has cheerfully agreed to add the boy to her regular Thursday crowd (bless her!) so I’m set for a four day writing week for the next six weeks. They won’t all be 3K days, of course. I was making a particularly determined effort today to hit the halfway mark.

More cauldron stuff, metals, fire as sacred, defining sacred and spiritual (that was first, taking a large chunk of the day, and wasn’t ultimately that much of the daily word yield, and it got me all muddled because really, how do you define that sort of thing?), and a ritual. I seem to be slogging around in the three introductory chapters, mainly because they define what the book and the path are all about, and a lot of it is vague and hard to pin down. Once they’re in some semblance of order I’ll be able to turn to the later chapters with a better footing.

Pizza as a reward tonight! As much as I would like it to be my homemade pizza I do not have meat or mushrooms for it. I’ll get some tomorrow with the general grocery order. For now, it is good order-in pizza. And I’m off to eat it!

Five Things

1. Unexpected phone calls from old friends. Doesn’t matter if you live in the same city, and talk to one another every ten days or so.

2. Hearing this particular old friend sound more relaxed and himself than has been usual.

3. New ‘imaginary friends’ – the people I only know on-line and may never meet in real life. Imaginary or not, they support me and encourage me and mean a lot to me.

4. Local friends, old and and not-so-old, who are also there for me.

5. Knowing that this fatigue thing is real and has an underlying cause, can be dealt with using a combination of medication and judicious conservation/parcelling out of energy.

6. (It’s my journal and I’ll add a sixth if I want to!) Sunlight outside, after a week or more of overcast skies and flurries.

Head, Meet Desk

Remember when I said The next time I see this should be when the Fed Ex delivery person hands me the box of page proofs?

The project manager separated the overall editor-review-edit from the copy-edit. I have to handle the copy-edit in two weeks.

I have a book to hand in a month and a half from now, a book that is going very slowly due to circumstances that are pretty much beyond my control. I may have to add an extra day to Liam’s daycare schedule every week instead of every two weeks if I’m going to lose a week to handling copy-edits.

On the somewhat more optimistic side of things, I can see the manuscript beginning to come together in some sort of odd way. It’s almost as if different portions of it are filling out or inflating into a somewhat recognisable shape, while other parts are still dead and flat. I need more of it to be alive so that I can connect more dots and deepen the exploration.

It’s not alive yet. That’s the problem. And I don’t know how to fix it. At some point it will magically happen, and then things will flow and connections will spider through the manuscript of their own accord, but until then every day is a slog uphill, pushing a ball of jumbled words and loose letters.

Friday Morning

HRH took the car today and dropped the boy at the caregiver’s for the stroke of eight, then drove to work. He’ll reverse the process tonight and pick Sparky up around the time I usually do. This is a test to see if I can get more done in a day, as my most productive time is between three and five-thirtyish. It also conserves my energy, allowing me to pour more into work instead of expending a lot of it getting the boy ready to go, doing the car thing, and coming back again. When you have a limited amount of energy before fatigue knocks you flat, toddler-wrangling and the drive takes a lot out of you. It may sound easy on paper, but living it is different. I also get into the proper headspace to write a lot faster when HRH takes the boy to his grandma’s every second Friday, so we theorized that it ought to work this way too. The main concern at the moment is how long it takes HRH to drive to work and home again afterwards. It’s against traffic both ways, but one never knows. It means an hour longer at daycare for the boy, though. We may do this two days a week and I’ll handle the other two.

So here I am, a batch of bread rising, at the computer already. This is good on my end, so far.

I did end up bowing out of rehearsal Wednesday night; I was just too exhausted. My body still hasn’t completely adjusted to the medication, so on top of the bad fibro day I was knocked out by eight o’clock. Unfortunately I woke up at midnight because Nixie was trying to dig her way out of my office, the door of which gets closed at night, and she’d accidentally been shut inside. I lay awake for two hours trying to get back to sleep, which was not good, and slept too lightly the rest of the night. I was low-key in Thursday as a result, but as Curtana and Arthur came to play it was a good relaxed morning that didn’t require too much of me. I made excellent scones (whole-wheat and honey!), the boys had a rip-roaring time together, and Curtana and I even got to talk about not-mom-things things before Liam hit his must-lunch-and-nap-now-or-never time. I slept badly last night, too. So far, the medication has given me five awesome days followed by one ungood day and a neutral day, and those last two days were mainly a result of being woken up out of the blessedly deeper sleep the medication grants me (which in turn helps alleviate some of the fibro problems). I’d say that’s a decent scorecard.

Right. To work!