Monthly Archives: March 2008

Respite!

All hail Janice, who while on the phone with me today for a different reason, prompted me to work out that I’d dropped an entire week from my deadline countdown. I know how it happened, too: on my miniature office calendar, the 24th and 31st are sharing the last Monday calendar square with no diagonal line dividing them. So it looks like I come back from Toronto on the 31st, not the 24th, which would have meant the next day was delivery day.

I have — you have no idea how it thrills me to say this — four extra days before my original deadline. That makes eight work days. Plus the three extra days my editor granted me.

That makes a grand total of eleven work days.

I am positively drunk with the possibilities.

It’s as if someone actually handed me all that extra time people have been saying they wish they could find for me. Thank you, universe. And no love, mini office calendar. I’m going to go through you right now and draw dividing lines on all the split days so I don’t make this mistake again.

Bonus Hearthcraft Book Update: Special Weekend Edition

I worked for another two hours last night, moving things around, cutting things out, and generally garnering more carrots.

I e-mailed my editor to ask for a three-day extension, and hated myself for it. She e-mailed me back this morning telling me that of course I could have an extension, that my books were always clean and she didn’t have to worry about them, which was appreciated on her end. I love my editor. With one sentence she wiped out all of my stress. Of course, she probably laughed like a loon at a request for a three-day extension, too. I suspect most requests are for weeks or months, not days.

We took Liam to the mall to see the Easter display of farm animals this morning and it was great fun to watch him scurry around, crouch down to peer through the fences, and laugh at the animals inside. His favourites were the fancy chickens and the goats. He had a good lunch and went down very easily for his nap, so now I have two hours to spend sorting through the MS, finishing sentences and making notes of places that need work.

While we were out I found the mp3 player I will buy after payday. It’s only fifteen dollars more than my first one cost (much less than I expected it to be), and this one is new so it will be fully guaranteed. I may even buy an extended warranty for it.

Oh, and the cinnamon toast made from the failed sweet buns? Big hit. “Mama? I like cimmamyum toast,” he informed me, cinnamon sugar and butter smeared all over his face. So do we, kid.

Hearthcraft Book Update

Total word count, hearthcraft book: 54,644
New words today: 1,600
Carrot count: 4+

Kitchens, shrines and altars, household spirits. (Yes, Prince Bear, there is now an official half-page on brownies, another two pages on brownie-like household spirits from other cultures.)

Despite how negative the day has felt, there was work done, and I’m mildly amazed at it. It’s just been an off day from the moment I woke up. Another album Tina lent me got me through it, Anner Bylsma’s excellent Violoncello of the Seventeenth Century. That and some serious replaying of the live recording of the Tragically Hip’s ‘Highway Girl’ this past half-hour.

The light is so good (about time the sun came out and I can turn off my overhead light) and the Hip are carrying me so well that if I didn’t have dinner to prepare before Sparky and HRH get home I might have continued working, except 55K is coming up quickly and frankly, that’s extremely disconcerting.

A week and a bit left. Four work days, as we’re going to see my parents for Easter. I’ve been thinking ‘two weeks left’ and that’s not true, even if I were staying home. I can’t face this work schedule right now.

A Morning — The ‘Good’ Is Debateable

My mp3 player died last night.

Yes, the refurbished one I got exactly two months ago. No, it’s no longer under warranty. I have no idea why it died; it worked perfectly well the night before, and would not turn on yesterday. And no, it’s not the batteries. I’m not going to be able to replace it for at least a week.

I had a very bad night. Listening to music via headphones helps me fall asleep, and it’s been invaluable. Also, I am understandably cranky because it died after only sixty days of use.

Rawr. And I forgot to pack Sparky’s heavy mitts and snow pants before he left for grandma’s house today. And I forgot to replace the spare clean top and pants in his bag. When I take him somewhere, my mind is working the right way and I remember everything. If HRH takes him, it’s like my mind disengages from the packing mode and won’t access the preparation subroutines beyond making sure he has his drink, his slippers, and his toys.

I used the breadmaker to mix and knead a batch of dough for sweet buns and forgot about it, so the machine tried to bake it before I got to it to turn off the cycle and take it out to shape it and leave it for a second rise.

And it’s dark out. Rawr and grr.

But when the cats knocked over my hurricane lamp that was on the altar, neither the chimney nor the base shattered. I put the half-baked loaf in the oven to finish baking, so there will be sweet bread, at least; maybe I’ll make cinnamon toast tomorrow for breakfast and just not mention to Sparky that it was supposed to be sweet buns.

Hearthcraft Book Update

Total word count, hearthcraft book: 53,044
New words today: 1,503
Carrot count: 2+

Rounding out chapters today. More on oil lamps, mostly kitchen stuff.

I was ‘helped’ by a five-month old ginger kitten who thinks stomping on my keyboard and chasing cursors and pointers is fun. He squished himself behind the monitor at one point and did the meerkat/sock puppet thing, peeking at me over the top. I nearly fell off my chair because I laughed so hard. And then he stuck his head into my glass of iced tea and slurped a good portion of it up before I caught him. The eternal purring began to get to me; at first it was cute, then I got tired of it, now it’s disturbing in its unceasingness. (Incessence?) I had to throw him out at one point and close the door to the office. When I let him back in after my next break he climbed all over the place again before literally falling over in my lap and passing out. I was wondering when that would happen; I knew I remembered kittens playing hard then falling over in a corpse-like slumber. What was amusing was when he woke up, he literally popped his head up, gave a little “Meer!”, then started purring again as he climbed back onto the desk to chase the pointer and appearing text. Cute, but exasperating.

Concert Announcement!

Yes, gentle readers, the time has come again to make plans to attend the Lakeshore Chamber Orchestra spring concert! Every spring we present a lively and soul-uplifting concert to celebrate the arrival of the season (or advent, or the invocation of said season in this particular case, ahem).

This year’s concert to celebrate/invoke/present an impassioned petition to spring presents a selection of French dance-themed music, some well-known, others perhaps a delightful discovery for you. The programme includes:

Overture to The Caliph of Baghdad by Boieldieu
Pavane pour une infante défunte by Ravel
Aires de danse dans le style ancien from Le roi s’amuse by Delibes
Pavane, op. 50 by Fauré
Symphony no. 1 by Gounod

The concert takes place on Saturday April 5, 2008 at 19h30, and will be presented at Cedar Park United Church at 204 Lakeview Ave, Pointe-Claire, QC (corner St. John’s Blvd). Admission is $10, children under 18 attend free of charge.

Directions via public transport may be found here. If you’re driving, take St. John’s Blvd south from either autoroute 40 or 20. Lakeview is one street south of autoroute 20; the church is on the south-west corner of the intersection, with a parking lot on the west side. Here’s a map to help you find your way.

Did I mention that we have a guest mandolin player? We have a guest mandolin player. Intriguing, yes?

So mark your calendars, and make a date with friends and family to share a wonderful evening of music and camaraderie. And maybe, just maybe, it will feel a little more like spring when we’re through.

Truths

Over at SFNovelists.com, Catherynne Valente has written her future self some notes about how she works, having just completed a novel and so it is all painfully fresh in her mind. While they’re not universally applicable, I can almost guarantee you’ll find one or two that do apply to you and your own methods and/or habits, if you write anything. There are little gems such as “you can only type at the rate your brain can create” scattered throughout the whole piece, too.

For example, the ones that resonate for me are:

3. You need about 40,000 words under your belt before you feel like you have a handle on how to write this book (I fully agree with Gaiman that you never learn how to write a novel, only how to write this novel). You don’t have a handle on it, not really, but you’ll feel more confident that the shape of things is clear and solid. At this point, you will panic and think that you will overshoot your contracted wordcount by at least a million words. You won’t. It is a small superpower that your initial estimated wordcounts are always within 2 or 3k of actual final count. You are very good at guessing the size of your babies. You ought to work at the fair. So calm down. You do this because you think your ideas are too big for the book you’ve given them. They aren’t. It’ll be ok. You made these things up–trust that they are not bigger than you are.

and

6. You will, at more than one point, hate this novel above all others and want nothing more than to forget it ever existed. Specifically, you will be worried that it is fragmented and nonsensical and does not hang together as a novel qua novel. You always think this and it is never (rarely) true. Never fear, you have the ability to write truly crappy things, but they usually hurt you like a kidney stone until you go back and fix them. Listen to the kidney stone feeling and fix it if it isn’t metal and then move on. But have faith that the novel as a whole will come as it is meant to, at the rate it is meant to, and that you have a lot of time to fix everything in post-production.

and also

7. When writing a book, you will feel uglier and lower and more worthless than at any other time in your wee mad psychic cycle. You will be cranky and fragile and all kinds of friable. This is because you are a bad shamany thing, and everything is pouring through you into the book. All the good things in you, beauty and faith and patience and tenderness and love, are going onto the page and that means there isn’t much left to make you feel like anything but a slimy bug thing. This is ok. It is the price you pay for what you do and how you do it. Understand that it will pass, and that there are people who love you, and that you are not slimy or a bug. You will recover. You will feel as though you deserve to be seen in the daylight again. This usually takes about three weeks post-deadline. Do not rush it, do not beat yourself up for not feeling better than you do. If you had had a real baby, it would be called post-partum depression. Just be thankful yours does not involve uncomfortable stitches.