Owls' Court

Nix is curled up in the heart-shaped wire bread basket on the table, and it's so damned cute it hurts. And the battery in my camera is officially dead. Curses!

Greatest Canadian Outcome

Well, Canadians have voted Tommy Douglas the Greatest Canadian, a fascinating statement about what we consider great, and what we consider Canadian.

The final ranking was as follows:

1 Tommy Douglas
2 Terry Fox
3 Pierre Elliott Trudeau
4 Sir Frederick Banting
5 David Suzuki
6 Lester B. Pearson
7 Don Cherry
8 Sir John A. Macdonald
9 Wayne Gretzky
10 Alexander Graham Bell

Trudeau really rose in the standings after Saturday night's final debate, as did Banting and Suzuki. I think Suzuki was really crippled by Melissa Auf de Maur's really lacklustre advocacy, though.

All in all, looking at those top five, I'm pleased at how things turned out. I voted for all of them at different times, for different reasons, but I'm more pleased at how Canada voted overall. These five truly deserve to be there, and I'll bet once the final tally is released we won't see much of a difference in numbers between Fox and Douglas at all.

A Truth

No matter where I am, there the Kleenex box is not.

Mailbox Joy!

And in the throes of guilt about doing my job correctly, what do I find in my mailbox but my copy of the contract for the green witchcraft book, my advance cheque, and the cheque covering my consultation fee for the first two books in the series!

Oh, right. I do this for the love of it, and for the very nice cheques they send me, too. Sometimes I forget.

Ups and Downs

I hate being the bearer of bad news. I really, really do. I feel so guilty for making other people upset. I'd much rather not do it, except that in this case there would then be an even bigger problem somewhere down the line, which would not only reflect badly on me, but on the company. That doesn't stop me from feeling guilt for throwing a huge stick into the spokes of the publishing process, and for giving my colleagues a headache first thing on a Monday morning.

I sent off the carefully composed bad news e-mail this morning, telling the team that this book we're editing is not the book we asked for. Not at all. And if we publish it, the lack of information it purports to convey will sink us. So we can either retitle it (which might not fly, because it's still not the book that was contracted) or get a rewrite done by someone else (and really, that means coming up with about 75% new material). Neither option is particularly attractive.

Oh, dear.

And as grr as I've been over the past couple of weeks as I've worked through this situation, I feel bad for the author, too, because I know this will hurt. I'm sure this author is very proud of the manuscript. It's just not the manuscript we wanted.

I'm going to go curl up with a cat and work on my YA novel for a bit. I need to distance myself from what's going on.

So Help Me Gods --

If one more person on the live Greatest Canadian debate calls hockey our national sport, I will not be responsible for my actions.

HRH on the no-holds-barred debate: "This is the best North American debate I've seen in about fifteen years."

Oh Dear

The project I'm editing bears no resemblance to what had originally been contracted. I'm at my wits' end. My solution? I'm proposing a title change. The contents of the book will be accurately reflected, and we'll avoid the months of serious rewrites.

The back of my throat feels a bit rough. My fall cold is quite late this year.

And my back is beginning to hurt. Ah,yes; the joys of working ten hour days at a keyboard are beginning to resurface.

Me = Goddess

After tinkering and installing and uninstalling and searching for drivers online, going in and out of safe mode, restarting, restarting, restarting, and, ultimately, juryrigging two programs together...

Behold: Space Ranger Tal and Princess Raven Starheart: Danger At Hand!

I rock. I so completely rock.

I really have to turn to editing again now that I've wasted three hours on this scanner issue, but I promise that early next week I'll scan them all and load them up on a page for you to enjoy. (And hey, I want to show off that awesome corset. Just wait till you see the shot of my back without the jacket, with all the lacing. Mmm.)

Later: Oh, the joys of Photoshop! Want to see what Tal did with this pic?

Pictures

We picked up the Halloween photos last night, and, damn, we looked good. Yes, Ceri, the pic of Princess Raven Starheart and Space Ranger Tal looking up and off-screen is there, and is perfect. I wish I had a functioning scanner.

The rolls we developed also included pictures from our Pennsylvania camping trip in August, and the very first Yule-type pictures, too. This is one of the reasons why a digital camera is beginning to sound like a better and better idea.

More Reality

Ceri has brought to my attention the fact that my book is now on the Chapters/Indigo website as well -- sans typo. Whee!

However, I must take this opportunity to grandstand for your local independent bookstore. Do me a favour and don't buy this through a chain; go to your local independent shop to buy it, and if it's not on the shelf, special order it. It will only take a couple of weeks, and you'll do more good by supporting the independent seller who is already struggling against big box shops chipping away at their customer base, be it a virtual big-box or the bricks-and-mortar kind.

Speaking of independents, my book will of course be available through The Magical Blend, aka Le Melange Magique, Montreal's premiere esoteric bookshop! Copies purchased through the Blend will be signed, as well. It's not listed yet for pre-order, but it will be in a couple of months.

One of Those Days

From Peg Kerr, on a conversation with Tim Powers:

[We] got to talking about our respective books. I told him that mine was finally moving, albeit slowly, and I was trying to keep my spirits up, even though my daily word count seemed so pitiful. "Although when I've done my daily session and I have only 100 words to show for it," I said ruefully, "if feels like I'm trying to bail the ocean out with a thimble."

"Nah," he said. "It's not that bad. It's just like trying to bail out a swimming pool with a thimble."

Wow, I guess that makes it seem better. Sorta.

I'm fairly certain this raises a harmonic of familiarity with many people I know.

Search Engine Joy!

I use Google a lot, but I've never clicked on the "More" buttons, or explored beyond the main page.

Today I did. And I found the beta version of Google Scholar Search.

For those of us who are academics, and who get frustrated with the endless pap that we have to sift through when we do a regular Google search, the "Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web."

Whee!

I hope this brings as much joy to you as it has to me. And if you knew about this already, why the hell haven't you told me?

Stealing Words

You all know how I feel about plagiarism. But where do you draw the line? How can you steal words that millions of people use every day? What's the likelihood of someone else coming up with the exact same sentence in a similar context, or the same sequence of notes?

Malcolm Gladwell has written an interesting article called "Something Borrowed" now online at the New Yorker. It's about a playwright who read a feature article he wrote about a psychiatrist who had just published her memoirs, and used it as a basis for a character in a play that went on to make a splash on Broadway. The problems start when the psychiatrist goes to see the play, and nearly has a creative coronary because her words and her life are played out in front of her. She obtains a copy of the play for closer examination.

“The whole thing was right there,” Lewis went on. “I was sitting at home reading the play, and I realized that it was I. I felt robbed and violated in some peculiar way. It was as if someone had stolen—I don’t believe in the soul, but, if there was such a thing, it was as if someone had stolen my essence.”

When the author of the original article contacts the playwright, he discovers that she has indeed acknowledged the huge debt that she owes to other sources upon whom she based characters, but not the original article which introduced the inspiration for the character of the doctor.

So why didn’t she credit me and Lewis? How could she have been so meticulous about accuracy but not about attribution? Lavery didn’t have an answer. “I thought it was O.K. to use it,” she said with an embarrassed shrug. “It never occurred to me to ask you. I thought it was news.”

The issue of enforcing originality is a big one right now, and it's hardly new. The real issue isn't the fact that we feel the need to protect our creations, however;

[t]he arguments [...] with the hard-core proponents of intellectual property are almost all arguments about where and when the line should be drawn between the right to copy and the right to protection from copying, not whether a line should be drawn.

We all want to protect our work. How far can we go to ensure that no one ever uses the same combination of words? That no one can ever say "what if?" and write a story or a song about the same situation, examining the same themes? And is it morally acceptable? Is it right to tell those around us, both now and in the future, that they can never use those words or those notes in that sequence again?

Under copyright law, what matters is not that you copied someone else’s work. What matters is what you copied, and how much you copied. Intellectual-property doctrine isn’t a straightforward application of the ethical principle “Thou shalt not steal.” At its core is the notion that there are certain situations where you can steal.

Steal, or share? Can we copyright ideas, or thoughts?

It's a thought-provoking article. Read it, and see what you think.

Muppet Show DVD Season Box Sets Unofficially Announced

An administrator over at MuppetCentral.com picked up this little tidbit at the Henson Film Festival and posted it. Muppet fans, rejoice!

It's Real, It's Real, It's Real!

Talk about a thrill --

Look what I came across while searching for a different book.

Pity about that lower-case typo that crept in when someone was entering the data. And a pity about the current lack of finalised cover art. But -- !!!

(And yes, it's on the Canadian site, too.)

More On Fanfic

Back to my show once more, The Teddybear Sawdust Show!

(This is the correct name, btw: The capitalised, exclamation point. Word.)

Today's topic is...

Fanfic.

Some of you have just had a visceral response. I know, me too. Why? Well, I'm glad you asked, because it should make you even more excited about my column than you usually are.

As usual, t! has crafted an excellent column exploring his views on the subject of the week. Interesting. See what you think.

(If you're coming here long after the weekly column has vanished, check out the November archives and look for the column entitled A GAME CALLED ECHO, dated November 14 & 21, 2004.)

Hmmm...

Woke up this morning thinking about my green witchcraft book.

It will be nice to sit down and noodle out a first chapter of that sometime in the next two weeks, now that I've got piles of notes, stacks of reference books marked with wonderful little sticky tabs, and the temporary obsession of hitting 50K in my YA novel by November 20 has safely passed.

It occurs to me that for most of my life, I've been the kind of girl who reads about six different books at once. Now I've grown into the type of woman who writes two or three different books at once. The apple, it does not fall far from the tree, no?

What I Did Last Sunday

Yesterday was a wonderful day. Ceri taught a bunch of us how to piece a quilt block together. The pattern is called Steps to the Altar, which is appropriate because it was a spiritual exercise. It was fascinating, and I finished my block during the actual workshop itself, but only because I'm an experienced hand sewer (although I've never pieced blocks before). Ceri and I had gone on a field trip to La Maison de Calico out in Pointe Claire Village on Friday, and while I was there I discovered the art of machine quilting. Quilting is the actual process of sewing a decorative stitch through the layers of your pieced blocks, quilt batting, and a backing. Ceri's a staunch traditionalist who wouldn't let a machine anywhere near her quilts, but I fell in love with the tone-on-tone designs created by machine quilting solid non-pieced cloth. I'm going to have to explore this. Curses! Another craft technique!

And last night was our debut concert of the 2004-05 season. Gratifyingly, there were about four times as many people in the audience as there were at the May concert in this church, and a larger audience is always a good thing. Everything went so well. Earlier in the day t! and I had used the words "in the zone" in reference to playing music, and that's what the whole evening felt like: I was in the cello zone. My eyes were seeing the notes on the page and my brain was transmitting the correct fingerings and bowings to my hands without engaging the concious mind, leaving me free to enjoy what was gong on without getting gummed up in the mechanics of the process. Sure, there were a couple of places where I lost what I was doing, came to in the sea of sound around me, and sat in mild confusion for a moment or so while I tried to find where we were in the music, but they were few and far between. And even better, I was able to slip back into that zen mode of playing quickly and with no difficulty, in order to enjoy the rest of the piece.

Every piece came off better than I had expected, but three stand out in my mind as really very good. I'm always worried about the Egmont Overture; it has some odd fingerings and rhythmic shifts for the celli, which make a couple of places where the theme rests with us sound weak. Every section pulled it off, though, with style and panache, and it kicked the evening off marvellously. The Water Music suite was a relief, because in warm-up the trumpets weren't in tune with one another and I think everyone was secretly worried that it would sink like a stone. But again, everything was practially perfect, and once the relief had manifested about halfway through the first movement, we settled in and really enjoyed it. And of course, the second half of the program, Beethoven's Symphony no. 1, blew everyone away, including us. I saw our conductor's face glow when we had played the last chords and spontaneously break into an excited grin before he looked down, composed himself, then looked up again to say thank you to us and bring us to our feet to receive the applause.

Ceri and Pasley, who came with us, loved it too, and there's nothing like walking out into a crisp November night with good friends who very evidently enjoyed themselves, and who chatter with you about the various cool bits of the night. Thanks, ladies! Your presence always means a lot to me. And the fact that my husband loves this kind of music that I've introduced him to helps, as well.

I always enjoy playing concerts, but I think this one is the one I've enjoyed the most so far. I find this curious, because the two concertos we played weren't really to my liking. If I could take them out and substitute one of the Haydn symphonies, and perhaps a Mozart symphony as well, then it might have been my ideal concert. But really, most of it had to do with how relaxed I was, how comfortable I was with the music, and the attainment of that elusive "in the cello zone" state.

Maybe I should piece quilt blocks before every concert. Or maybe it was the chicken nuggets I had for dinner.

NaNo Accomplished!

The Moments of Being Pandora

Current word count: 50,334
Total words today: 3,863

Please note the date stamp. Yes, it's November 20, that date of wonder and my secret goal.

No, it isn't finished; I want to expand some sections, and there will be a final chapter added to wrap up the decisions made by the protagonists in the current chapter. But the goal of the NaNoWriMo exercise has been met, as has my silly wistful personal goal of finishing on or by November 20.

I am sauteeing shrimp in ridiculously good olive oil to celebrate.

Concert Reminder!

Did you catch the mention of a dress rehearsal in my last post? Yes, the first concert for the Lakeshore Chamber Orchestra 2004-05 season is finally here!

The details:

November 21, 2004 at 19.00 h
Valois United Church
70 Belmont Avenue, Pointe-Claire, QC
(corner King's Road and Belmont, north of Highway 20 and west of Sources Blvd)
Admission $10

The programme:

Beethoven's Egmont overture
Handel's Water Music suite II in D major
Stamitz' Double Clarinet Concerto in B major
Mozart's Horn Concerto No. I in D major

and the piece de resistance,

Beethoven's First Symphony

Okay, it's all really amazing, but I love ending with this symphony, I truly do. I see from the concert post-mortem I wrote after the concert we played in this church last May that "the church has beautiful acoustics. One never knows what to expect when one plays in a new venue; it stuns me how so many similarly-structured churches can have such wildly varying acoustic qualities. This is one of the best I've played in so far. The sound was full, well-rounded and rich." And the orchestra ain't half bad, either. We also have some phenomenal soloists playing with us, including our two clarinetists, a new horn player, and a guest trumpet.

I've left the last two rehearsals simply blazing with excitement, so that ought to tell you something about how I'm playing and how much fun I'm having. That's always a good sign.

As always, here are directions:

Mapquest, for those with autos or friends with autos who may be bribed with a ticket and a coffee
STM bus from Lionel Groulx

Goodnight NaNo

I checked the NaNo message boards when I got home from teaching tonight, and found a little love note from sandman7 where he politely chortled about passing my word count again.

So I wrote more words, although I really should have gone to bed because I have a very early rehearsal tomorrow, and I have to be bright-eyed and ready to play at a very silly hour.

The final tally for today:

Current word count: 46,471
Total words today: 4,070

That's less than 4K left, Gentle Readers. I'm about to embark on another ridiculous weekend of no time to breathe or eat, so we'll see what happens. I might not finish until Monday morning, as irritating as that may be. And I'm so close to my November 20th dream deadline! Argh!

NaNo Update

The Moments of Being Pandora

Current word count: 44,844
Total words today: 2,443

Oh, and Blade? You have a new ritual robe. I'd say that's an acceptable day's work.

NaNo Oops

When reading my total words written for the day from the NaNo spreadsheet last night, I mistakenly read from the wrong column.

I didn't write 7,599 words yesterday.

Aha! you say. I knew it couldn't be true!

I wrote 8,566 words.

Gulp.

The 7,599 was in the column of how many words Ihad left to write before hitting the 50K target. Yeah, yeah, I know... give me a spreadsheet which automatically calculates totals so that I don't have to do math, and I still get the numbers wrong.

Canada Reads 2005!

Think your book club is big? Check out the coast-to-coast book club with the largest membership in Canada!

The 2005 Canada Reads slate has been announced:

* Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers, defended by singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright;
* Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, defended by Toronto city councillor Olivia Chow;
* Frank Parker Day's Rockbound, defended by author Donna Morrissey;
* Mairuth Sarsfield's No Crystal Stair, defended by Olympic fencer Sherraine MacKay;
* Jacques Poulin's Volkswagen Blues (translated by Sheila Fischman), defended by author and former National Librarian Roch Carrier.

And yet again, I have read none of these. It usually takes me a couple of years to work up to a new Margaret Atwood, which explains why Oryx and Crake still isn't on my shelf. I thought I might own Beautiful Losers but I checked, and it's The Favourite Game that's on my shelf. No Crystal Stair is a YA novel about various characters interacting within the black community in 1940s Quebec. The Chapters-Indigo site says that Rockbound is "extraordinary Maritime fiction. Gritty and realistic, it combines intricate detail of fishermen's lives and accurate East Coast dialect with literary analogies and references to the Canterbury Tales and The Tempest" (oh dear). And they say this about Volkswagen Blues: "Jack, a man in search of his brother. In a Volkswagen van, he travels east from Montreal to the Gaspé, then west and south to St. Louis and then farther south and farther west. Early in his travels, Jack picks up a hitchhiking woman who becomes his travelling companion. The geographical journey --through Detroit, into Chicago, on to St. Louis, along the Oregon Trail, and into California - becomes a metaphor for the history of the French in North America." (Oh dear, again. Who writes these blurbs? Why do they have to sound so pretentious? What's wrong with a good story standing on its own?)

You have plenty of time to read, because the first book battle begins on February 21 on CBC Radio. A different book by a Canadian author is debated each day and citizens vote until a sole survivor stands victorious amid the dust on February 25th. Past winners have included Next Episode (Prochain Épisode) by Hubert Aquin in 2003; In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatjie; and The Last Crossing by Guy Vanderhaeghe. Check out the Canada Reads website for more details!

NaNo Addendum

Addendum, 10:46 PM:

Current word count: 42,401
Total words today: 7,599. This by far the best word count I have ever pulled off on any project. Ever. Ever ever. It will be probably be rough to top it before I die. Not that it hurt, it's just... highly unlikely.
I'm on: Chapter Twelve, which launches Part Three: The Future. War, death, threats, terrorist attacks on the very essence of the fairy realm... here we go.
Music: The Goldberg Variations as arranged and performed by Bernard Labadie and Les Violons du Roy (Thank you, Lise!).
Coolest Thing of the Day: Yet again, the word count. Woo! Although a couple of very interesting political twists showed up when I certainly hadn't consciously planned for them, which was also cool. They work rather well, too, so no complaints here.
Biggest Irk of the Day: I want to say how poorly I planned Part Two (although I didn't know until I'd written it how much room it needed to be told properly) except this is what rough drafts are for, right? So really, the biggest irk is writing over 7.5K and still not reaching third place among those racing towards 50K. And that's rather small of me after the phenomenal writing day I've had. I could turn the laptop back on and bash out 183 words to hit third place, but that's just petty. Besides, my mind is now rather empty and I have to think about how to begin Chapter Twelve properly.
Best Typo: Actually, today it's the most amusing auto-correct attempt from our pal Word. It tried to correct "the faerris looked at me" into "the Ferraris looked at me." I was, of course, trying to type "faeries." Word's lack of a sense of humour (and really, every MS product's failure to exhibit a satisfactory sense of humour, now that I think about it) is probably one of the very real reasons why the fairy realm is slowly being destroyed.

Back in the NaNo Again

The Moments of Being Pandora

Current word count: 40,084. Yes, you read that right. I passed 40K.
Total words today: So far? 6,249. And counting, baby.
I'm on: The second interlude, which separates Part Two: The Present and Part Three: The Future. I finished Chapter Ten, and wrote all of a rather long Chapter Eleven this afternoon. Chapter Eleven was originally intended for Part Three, but has now been shifted to finish up Part Two due to the necessity of correct pacing. When I edit this thing post-November, I might condense two of the Part Two chapters into one, possibly 6 and 7, to return to the five-chapters-per-part plan; I don't know. Not important at the moment.
Music: CBC Radio Two for the most part; then later on I listened to the Carrington film score by Michael Nyman, and The Prisoner of Azkaban score (oops, almost typed Zenda there) is just finishing up as I type this.

Bests and worsts of the day still to come, because I intend to write more, more, more, muah-hah-hah...

Hmm...

While ogling LCD monitors online, I realised that if I buy one, a chunk of it gets written off as a home office purchase, the same way my ISP and DSL gets written off.

Ooooo. Oh, my.

Happiness Is...

... having a long conversation with your ex-boyfriend about what you're going to name the kids, while your husband cheerfully bashes out more word count in the next room.

It's particularly poignant when the ex is writing a book about characters that the two of you and your other oldest friend created over a decade ago, characters which are still very close to your heart, and pretty much ingrained in your personality forever now (which is where they originated, anyway). SAVWAA forever; forever SAVWAA.

"No, I've always hated that name. Yeah,we could go with that one. Sure. But I thought we were going to name him this? Okay; we give him a double-barrelled name. Absolutely not; no daughter of mine will ever be named that."

People are having babies all around me. Since I can't have one yet, I still get the fun of naming kids.

Sometimes, I love my life.

NaNo Update: 36,865. Yes, things are looking up.

Sigh: NaNo Reflections

In the past seven days, I have been able to sit down with my laptop a grand total of once. Sure, I pulled off 5K+ when I did sit down and write, but I've been unable to make any real progress on my NaNo project. If you'll recall, I scheduled Wednesdays and weekends as no-gos, and had two other floating days where I knew I wouldn't get anything done. That schedule has now gone out the window, because I passed my quota of no-writing-days last week. Life gets in the way. I know this. I also know that I can make up for it with little difficulty. I know this in my head, but my heart is playing a different tune. By now, I wanted to be further along than I am. In 2002 I hit 50K on November 20, and secretly that's been my deadline ever since. I blew it last year (as Tal says, it was like blood from a STONE), but this year I had a pretty good chance at it. That's had, past tense.

I'm frustrated because other projects have taken more time than they ought to have taken. I'm frustrated because I haven't been able to get any sort of continuity to the writing process. Sure, I've pulled off two days of 5K+ since I began, and theoretically all I need is another three days of 5K to hit the finish line, but that's not how I want to do this. I'm also frustrated because the story really isn't driving me. I'm writing it, and it works, but I'm not as excited about it as I have been about my other books in past years. Oddly enough, I think this one has the most potential to be published. Go figure.

Today, once this manuscript is out of my hands with a clearly defined editorial memo, my attention is back to writing my YA book. I've promised myself some sewing this afternoon as a break and a reward (another project that I was aiming to finish last week, but which was sidelined because of work), and I have nothing scheduled for tonight, either. So I'm looking forward to a long, relaxing day spent writing, and writing all for myself. (I mean relaxed as compared to pulling my hair out editing. Does that phrase make more sense to you now?) So, to sandman7 (whose dust I am joyfully chewing, simply because of who he is and how deliriously happy I am to see him this far up in the standings) and to my wonderful dance partner SavageKnight, who is now leading this dance while I've been tripping over my train: hang on to your word counts, boys.

Did I mention that HRH wrote over one thousand words last night while I was at rehearsal? He did. I'm thrilled.

Arts In the News

Sears and Kmart have signed a deal to merge, thus ensuring the triumph of polyester everywhere.

But seriously --

MIriam Towes, who lost the Giller Prize to Alice Munroe last week, has won the Governor General's Award for English Fiction. Her book, A Complicated Kindness, is about a 16 year old girl in a Manitoba Mennonite community. And again, just as with the Giller Prize last week, I am ashamed to say that I have read none of the fiction nominees this year.

What do you get if you win a GG?

The Canada Council for the Arts funds, administers and promotes the Governor General’s Literary Awards. Each laureate will receive a cheque for $15,000 and a specially-crafted copy of the winning book bound by master bookbinder Pierre Ouvrard. The Governor General will also present certificates to the publishers of the winning books, and the Canada Council will provide each publisher with a $3,000 grant to support promotional activities for the winning book.

If you lose, you get a $1,000 consolation prize.

You can read the Canada Council for the Arts' press release announcing al the winners here.

And finally...

John Morgan, who retired from the Royal Canadian Air Farce comedy team, has died at age 74.

Morgan was once asked his reason for being a writer.

"I figured if I was going to get stabbed in the back, I'd prefer it to be with a pen," he responded.

Indeed.

I Have A Bad Feeling About This

Editing a new book.

May I just say "argh?" I mean, really. Simple sentence structure. Is it too much to ask? And punctuation. Correct use of quotation marks, and not following every set with a period, particularly in the middle of a sentence.

It takes so little to make me happy.

NaNo at the Halfway Point

We're fifteen days into the month of November; the deadline to finish is now fifteen days away. When I started today, I was 3K past the halfway point in my word count, so I was a day or two ahead of the average game, but behind where I wanted to be, which was 30K.

And today?

I have no idea where this surge of energy came from. I thought I was dead in the water. I spent three forced days away from this project, and I had no inspiration when I sat down today, nor did I like what I'd written when I reread it.

But somehow:

The Moments of Being Pandora

Current word count: 33,787
Today's word count: 5,223. Where did it come from? I honestly don't know.
Music: Praetorious' Dances for Terpsichore (why haven't I thought of this one before?), the Incredibles score (which alas, although I adore it, hinders my writing terribly, much to my chagrin -- it's just not the right feel), the Escaflowne movie score, and the Prisoner of Azkaban score.
I'm on: Chapter Ten.
Best typo of the day: There are three which really amuse me: "the gentleman in a deep purple cat turned around to look at me;" "standing stenos" instead of "standing stones" (that one had me laughing for a while); and "will they destory the fae?" Destory. How ironic, since I'm writing a piece of fiction about the continued existence of fairies and their history in the face of advancing technology.
Biggest irk of the day: My candles kept going out. Damn cheap dollar-store pillar candles.
Coolest thing of the day: Over five thousand words. Come on! What could possibly be cooler than that at this point?

SavageKnight, my current NaNo dance partner, is 519 words behind me at this moment. I caught up to his earlier count of 31,193 but it seems that he's been writing this afternoon, too. Like me, he was unable to write all weekend. I'm cheering for him to pass me, because it's fun to have an opponent with an attractive word count to use as a target, and with whom you can banter. It's a combination of stinging and enabling, really.

Brief

If you called, e-mailed, or have been checking this online journal for proof of my continued existence, be reassured. I'm not dead; I worked 23 hours over the weekend at Con*Cept, Montreal's F/SF convention, and finally saw The Incredibles too on Saturday night. It made for an even blearier Sunday morning, but it was worth it.

Because I got nothing else done over the weekend, I have a pile-up of things I absolutely have to work on today, so I'm using the morning to catch up. I'll do web and e-mail stuff later today, as per my new schedule of What To Work On When. There's a new book which arrived last Friday that I have to edit by Thursday; teaching stuff and advising appointments to prepare; more research for the green witch book; word count for NaNo to produce (I haven't even looked at the new totals in Montreal yet, and I'm afraid to see where SavageKnight stands); and of course that never-ending e-mail to sort through, which I don't dare look at because it will suck up at least three hours.

My weekend was fun, but very draining. I assisted five or seven new cool authors (Kelley Armstrong! Harry Turtledove! Keith deCandido! Steve Erikson!) plus one I already knew from last year (I love Karl Schroeder to bits; can I keep him?), and caught up with people whom I never see except at Con*Cept now that Nebula, Montreal's F/SF bookshop, has been dead and gone these four and a half years.

So off I go. Musings on the events of the weekend to follow at a later time, possibly even tomorrow, but more likely whenever I need a break.

Idiosyncrasies

From Laurell K Hamilton's online journal:

(Just to provide a bit of context: LKH writes two series of books, one about a modern-day faery princess/PI character called Merry Gentry, and the other about a vampire hunter/necromancer character called Anita Blake.)

I’ve found that Merry writes better if I pay more attention to my appearance. Merry just isn’t a jeans and t-shirt kind of girl. Especially when just putting a nicer shirt and a pair of boots on dresses up the jeans. I guess I can’t argue. Since I’ve been dressing more for the ‘office’ I’m averaging ten pages a day. If wearing a little bit of make up and a nicer shirt and jewelry does it for Merry, then I’m not arguing. Today I’m sort of dressed half way between the two series. Nice black jeans, but white comfy tennis shoes (Nike had stopped making their all black jogging shoes), a white t-shirt with penguins on it, and a quote that says, “Wilderness... the permanent home of the human spirit” by Joseph Wood Krutch. But I’ve got a tailored black suit jacket over it all, a little bright red lipstick, a touch of eye-liner, frankly left over from yesterday. Merry seems okay with the look, and it looks surprisingly good together. Anita simply does not care. Funny, I’d tried everything in my office to get Merry to play better with me, and what she actually wanted was a little more effort on my part. Frankly, when we first got back from tour Jonathon and I were strictly t-shirt, jeans, and jogging shoes. Merry let me get away with it for awhile, but the honeymoon’s over, back to work.

I find it interesting how different writers use a wide variety of methods to connect with their characters. I tend to lean towards drinking different beverages for each book (my early GCN work was done with Vanilla Coke, which suited the material; the first NaNo novel could only be written while drinking Lady Grey tea, and so forth... I honestly don't remember what I was drinking when I wrote the spellcraft book this spring, it was over so quickly), but once or twice I've found that wearing the right colour or a finding a different way of doing my hair helps get into the head of the character.

Eh. Whatever helps, right?

Writerly Musings on Scheduling and Word Count

My usual routine is to get up, make tea, check e-mail and read news and online journals, do some research, work for a couple of hours on work stuff, then after lunch I open the laptop for some writing on whatever the project of the day might be.

Lately, producing words in the early afternoon has been like wringing blood from a stone. It hurts. I grit my teeth. I develop headaches. Mid-afternoon is when it all comes grinding to a halt.

Then later in the afternoon, I sit down for another go, and all of a sudden there's another thousand words and added to the blood-from-stone count, I've written over my 2K daily quota.

I don't understand how or why it is the way it is, but hey, there's definitely a pattern. It's not the pattern I observed when I wrote the spellcraft book last spring; maybe it's project-related. I know that I work better on the green witchcraft book when it's morning. Maybe I'll rearrange things so that I'll focus on the green witchcraft book in the mrning, do e-mail and research and such mid-day/early afternoon, and work on NaNo late afternoon. If that's what my brain is fighting for, well then, let's try it and see what happens.

The Moments of Being Pandora

Current word count: 27, 801. And I still have an hour before I leave to meet my mother and aunts for dinner.
Today's word count: something like 2,300 so far.
Music: the Prisoner of Azkaban score, Yo-Yo Ma Plays Ennio Morricone, the Fairy Tale score, and Evanescence. Hey, I'm eclectic.
I'm on:Chapter 9! Woo-hoo! Over half-way finished! Still revising my outline, but hey, at least it's moving now.
Biggest irk of the day: The right and left mouse button next to my cursor controlling eraser-tip button are giving out on my laptop. I have to bash at them. So to alleviate frustration, I've taken the plug-in mouse away from HRH and I'm now using that. He has a perfectly functioning touchpad; he can deal.
Coolest thing of the day: Um. Maybe the confirmation that NaNo works better between 4 and 6 pm. That and the emergence of politics in the fairy realm of my novel, which should be good for plenty of word count.

Jonathan Strange

I've finished Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, and may I just say to everyone who's touting this as a Harry Potter Book for adults that being set in England, the existence of magic, and a male magic-wielding protagonist does not a Harry Potter book make?

Excellent book; very dense, quite philosophical (which was just fne for academically-minded me), slow action, lots of subtle showing-not-telling. Magic exists openly, but mostly as theoretical, thus creating social conflict when practical magicians begin to emerge. Superb characters; and great Napoleonic magic-in-warfare stuff. I love Wellington, and I think he may be my favourite secondary character, closely tied with Arabella Strange.

It's not Harry Potter at all, so it's a good thing I didn't pick it up for that reason. If you're looking for something Potterish to tide you over until The Half-Blood Prince comes out (still a dreadful title), this is not it. It's very good; it's very intellectual. I just don't want anyone buying it for the wrong reasons thanks to peer marketing which is just wrong. Besides, it implies that Harry Potter isn't acceptable reading for adults, and by now you know where I stand on adults ignoring well-written and thoughtful YA fiction just because it's written for kids.

Greatest Canadian Update

The current standings for the Greatest Canadian poll are:

Wow. Tommy Douglas. Then again, we are Canada, and we're all about the little guy looking out for his people.

Outraged at the current standings? Go vote!

There's an interesting breakdown of male vs female voters on the Standings web page.

The final unveiling of the Greatest Canadian will be held in a two-part show broadcast on November 28 and 29. Check out the ongoing schedule here and watch a few episodes between now and then, and learn more about the Canadians who make a difference to our citizens.

Can I just say that I want the hat that Adrienne Clarkson is currently wearing at the Remembrance Day ceremonies? It's a lovely black felt with a black and red poppy on the front side. Pictures when I find them.

In Flanders Fields

Perhaps I should have made clear that 25K is all I care about in the novel-writing part of my life. There's a bunch of other stuff I care about right now, like how much I have to practice the second movement of the Stamitz double clarinet concerto, and dinner out tonight with my mum and her two sisters (yea, verily, all in one city -- tremble, Montreal), and the fact that it's Remembrance Day (Veteran's Day, for all you people south of the border, or what once was known as Armistice Day).

While I have, in the past, gone out to stand in Place du Canada downtown for the city ceremony of remembrance, I've been having bad headaches lately which come out of nowhere, and I think it best if I stay home and do my own thing today. I usually do a ritual to commemorate those who gave their lives to defend the way of life which we still enjoy today, and to honour their dedication to a cause in which they believed. And I listen to the radio coverage of the ceremonies at the Tomb of the Unknown Solider in Ottawa, and do my minute of silence. I've been wearing my poppy since the day after Halloween, and not just because I love poppies. Every year I see fewer people wearing them; every year more people let it slide. Part of this, I understand, is that as those who sell the poppies to raise funds for the veterans -- the veterans themselves -- are dying. Each year, there are fewer and fewer people to stand in markets, malls, and on street corners, asking for a donation of a couple of coins in return for a small red velveteen flower to be pinned to your lapel to remind those around you of those who served. Next year, if you're looking for some volunteer civic work, why not call your local legion and ask if you can donate a day to selling poppies in your neighbourhood?

Why is it important to not let it slide?

Every November 11th, Canadians across the country pause in a silent moment of remembrance for the men and women who served our country during wartime. We honour those who fought for Canada - in the First World War (1914-1918), the Second World War (1939-1945) and the Korean War (1950-1953). More than 1,500,000 Canadians served overseas - more than 100,000 died. They gave their lives and their future so that we may live in peace. (Veteran Affairs, Canada)

It's not pro-war; it's simple courtesy. It's an acknowledgement of history. And it's a thank-you for believing in something so strongly that they chose to leave friends and family to go overseas, to fight for something they thought was right.

Anyone seen the new Heritage Canada commercial depicting John McCrae scribbling words in his tattered notebook, standing in the dark between the makeshift crosses, the muddy and bloody men on stretchers, and the medical tent? That's Colm Feore. I love Colm Feore. And he portrays John McCrae very well.

But the point here is the imagined setting, and the moment of inspiration, for the creation of this classic poem recited by every Canadian schoolchild on this day.

We strive to not "break faith" by wearing those small red flowers in early November. We remember them. We hold their sacrifice in highest honour. They, among others, made our country what it is.

Half NaNo

I passed 25K of The Moments of Being Pandora last evening before I left for orchestra. That's all I care about at the moment. The story's rewriting itself as I go, which means I've tossed out two chapter ideas from my outline, but as they were just case-type things, that's fine since they didn't have any major plot threads scheduled to emerge in them. Maybe once it's done I'll go back and insert them, but for now, the story flows just fine. In fact, the focus has shifted, I've discovered, which is also fine; I think it makes for a better and more cohesive unit overall. We'll see when it's done.

Missing the Point

So I did a quick search on carpal tunnel exercises this morning, and there, in the sidebar, was the typical advert for related merchandise.

Except it said:

Yeah, just what everyone's looking for on eBay -- discount carpal tunnel syndrome.

Music and the Brain

October 25, 2004

What is the secret of music's strange power? Seeking an answer, scientists are piecing together a picture of what happens in the brains of listeners and musicians

By Norman M. Weinberger

Music surrounds us -– and we wouldn't have it any other way. An exhilarating orchestral crescendo can bring tears to our eyes and send shivers down our spines. Background swells add emotive punch to movies and TV shows. Organists at ballgames bring us together, cheering, to our feet. Parents croon soothingly to infants.

And our fondness has deep roots: we have been making music since the dawn of culture. More than 30,000 years ago early humans were already playing bone flutes, percussive instruments and jaw harps -- and all known societies throughout the world have had music. Indeed, our appreciation appears to be innate. Infants as young as two months will turn toward consonant, or pleasant, sounds and away from dissonant ones. And when a symphony's denouement gives delicious chills, the same kinds of pleasure centers of the brain light up as they do when eating chocolate, having sex or taking cocaine.

Therein lies an intriguing biological mystery: Why is music -- universally beloved and uniquely powerful in its ability to wring emotions -- so pervasive and important to us?

Read the whole article at Scientific American.com.

(Found via Arts & Letters Daily.)

The S Word

On the way downtown to meet MLG for lunch yesterday, my bus was caught in a delightfully dizzy little mini-blizzard, right in front of the Westmount library. Nothing much -- just dry little dots racing about, playing tag; maybe ten to a square foot, but they moved around so much that they presented the illusion of more. I saw grown men walking along the sidewalk, hands in their coat pockets, looking up and smiling, and it made me smile, too.

It didn't accumulate, of course; I'm fairly certain none of it even reached the ground in snowflake form. And it had stopped by the time we reached Greene Avenue. It was, however, snow. Not bad snow; happy snow. A cheerful postcard of sorts from Winter saying, "Can't wait to play with you!"

There were occasional snow dots wandering aimlessly outside my front windows earlier this morning, as well. They looked more bored than anything else. I do not want bored snow; bored snow can become dangerous snow. I want to be slowly introduced to winter as painlessly as possible this year.

NaNo Yet Again

I pulled off just over 3700 words today. I really have to remember that when I break my daily quota up into two or three shorter chunks, it's easy. Expecting to sit down and pull it off all at once is long and arduous. I prefer it when my quota sneaks up on me and suprises me with a cheerful wave from somewhere behind me. So my current word count stands at 20,263 and I'm enjoying Part Two more than I was when I began it this morning, partly because it isn't precisely what I thought it would be; it's the same idea, but it's manifesting differently. This is part of what I love about the writing process. So now Chapter 6 is done; I'll start Chapter 7 tomorrow.

I had a terrific lunch with MLG today, and we talked about NaNo. (Duh -- two writers, at lunch. What else do you think we talked about? I mean, aside from parents and work and such.) MLG commented that NaNo doesn't seem to be fitting the needs of our writing gang, and he's right. We write all the time. What we need to is to refocus on our own goals rather than on the cool idea of NaNo, among other things, because most of us have this writing-a-daily-quota thing down already.

Of course, it's still about loosening your inhibitions enough to create a messy work of art from start to finish in thirty days. We've just noticed that most of our friends aren't focusing their efforts on novels any more per se. We have serials and screenplays and other fiction which they'd prefer to be working on.

Dinner now, and then I think we'll watch Labyrinth.

So

very

tired.

My internal clock is way out of whack because our coven did a Samhain ritual at five-thirty, the last people left at 9.00, and now my inner time-keeper can't decide if it's four in the afternon, or two in the morning. (Yeah, Samhain. Remember? Fifteen degrees into Scorpio? A blessed one, and all that. Welcome to the dark half of the year. Argh. And BTW, nice work this evening, all.)

I wrung 1,100-ish words out to at least say that I did some sort of writing this weekend. Finished the interlude. Tomorrow, I start Part Two.

But now, I am so bound for bed.

We Didn't Even Drink That Much

We had a fabulous dinner out last night; twelve of us in a friend's off-island home, wonderful food (too much food! Well, too much dinner-type food, but certainly not enough dessert), and terrific company.

We all needed it. So many thanks to our gracious host who brought us all together so the we could make fun of each other, toss banter back and forth, laugh until we hurt, and in general enjoy each others' presence, as we so rarely get to do.

Warning: High Cuteness

I just had to put this up for a certain Cougar:

The Hello Kitty Online World!

Hello Kitty and friends welcome you to the exciting and fantastic Hello Kitty World! This is the first-ever online game platform featuring the all-time-favorite Hello Kitty characters from Sanrio!

Hello Kitty World will allow thousands of players to live and participate in Hello Kitty's magical and cute online world. You will be able to roam the streets of Kitty Kingdom, XO Federation, and Melody-land. Enjoy the beautiful landscape and architecture of Puroland or Badtzcity and participate in numerous puzzles, story lines, or adventures lead by the worldwide community of Hello Kitty World subscribers. You can even have a successful career, open different shops, earn and spend Sanrio Dollars in your bank, buy a house, and trade with other players around the vast game world.

Other than hundreds of choices for you to build your dream house and lovely player characters, Hello Kitty World players will also be able to raise pets and teach them special tricks and skills. Players will be able to cooperate and interact with other players to overcome a joint quest or challenge other friends to a friendly duel.

You will be able to make new friends through special in-game telepathy as well as interact with other gamers through a variety of community channels and forums. Share the exciting world of Hello Kitty World and spread the message of love with both your old friends and the new ones you have just met in the Hello Kitty World.

So, what are you waiting for? Hello Kitty and friends will see you all in Hello Kitty World!

You know you want to...

(via BoingBoing)

Whew

Finally got to sleep at 4.45; woke up at 8.30. Did teaching prep, email stuff, work stuff. Then I wrote for an hour and a half. My internal clock may have been derailed, but things still get done. I'm surprised and pleased.

Current word count: 15,392. So yes, it seems to be going better. I finished Chapter 5, which means Part One: Past is over and done, huzzah and yay in general. Thus my morale is much higher than it has been over the past couple of days. Everything I've written so far feels like set-up, but it was also character introduction and exploration, so it was necessary -- for me, anyway. Whether it's necessary or not for the hypothetical reader will be discovered somewhere in the future if I decide it's worth pursuing.

I've also chosen to set the interlude and Part Two: Present a couple of years later, so the protagonists will then be fifteen years old and have two years of experience with the situation under their belts. Then the second interlude and Part Three:Future will take place two years after that, making them seventeen. I think it will add more depth to the story. We'll see.

Now I'm going to go have a bath to relax. I might have another short hour-long nap (otherwise I will be completely and utterly useless tonight in class!) before I finish prepping for said class. Then I'll work on the other book I'm supposed to be writing (you know, the one they're paying me for?), which is thankfully still in the research and piles-of-notes stage, and thus serves as a welcome alternative to the NaNo project.

Okay, Maybe A Nap Wasn't Such a Good Idea After All

Ugh.

Yes, the time stamp is correct. I took that two-hour nap around dinner, and I've been up ever since.

So after adding to my NaNo word count, I decded to work on the Owldaughter site. Not only have the new reviews been posted, but the See page has now been activated, with two categories: Work, and Play. They're nowhere near complete, but because I don't have a functioning scanner I can't do much more at the moment.

I now have an evil headache. I'm going to take some headache candy, and go back to bed.

Reviews Up

The Samhain book reviews are up; check out my reviews of Second Circle by Venecia Rauls, and Advanced Witchcraft by Edain McCoy.

And I forgot to mention that HRH's acceptance into the computer animation program arrived today. He has a student number and everything. Let's hear it for retraining and updating work skills!

NaNo, Continued

The Moments of Being Pandora

Current word count: 11,667
Today's word count: 2,050
I'm on: Chapter 4 (just finished it!)
Music: Tori Amos (Little Earthquakes, Under the Pink, plus both To Venus and Back CDs) and the Princess Mononoke film score
Biggest irk so far today: Not quite enjoying it yet, and still waiting for the real story to kick in. Maybe somewhere over the past year the fact that writing is now my job stole some of the fun away. That, and I was so sleepy all day... Oh, wait. The paving crew outside using the steamrollers and big pounding things to flatten the the road, which made the apartment building dance, knocking stuff down and scaring the fluff out of little Cricket Mouse. That wasn't much fun either. I certainly couldn't write through it.
Coolest thing today: I finished Chapter 4, which gets my protagonist Alexander to a certain position so that the rest of the novel can happen. Finally! It also means that I have only one more chapter before Part One of the novel, subtitled The Past, is over. Once Chapter 5 is done then I get to write the first interlude, which is from the POV of my secondary protagonist, Pandora; and then I get to start Part Two, subtitled The Present, which is where my original idea of "Encyclopedia Brown meets the X-Files" comes into play.

Chili tonight! Then maybe more writing; maybe sleep.

Update: Yeah, took a nap from 7.30 till 9.30, woke up, and did another 1300 words. I feel much better. I should just accept that I need a catnap in the late afternoon to keep my productivity up in general, not just for writing.

Desperately craving cheese curds. I must have squeaky cheese.

No! No! It is a ploy to remove me from my desk! I must resist!

Industry Category: Other

I absolutely had to pick up this bumper sticker at the store yesterday; I'd never seen it before.

I've pinned it on my bulletin board next to my desk, because it makes me laugh whenever I read it.

Calendrical Convenience, My Foot

What's with the Wednesday thing? All week I've been befuddled as to what weekday it actually is. Yesterday I thought it was Friday. Today I thought it was Monday. On Monday, I thought it was Thursday.

I'd put it down to Daylight Savings, except we didn't lose a day, just an hour. It probably has more to do with the fact that I wasn't really home this weekend; I was either zoned out with a migraine, at class, at a party, doing the movie marathon, or at a ritual. And come to think of it, I worked at the store last Monday and Friday, too, covering someone on vacation.That also would have spun my sense of week out of control, as I usually only go in on Wednesdays.

And what's with the dark before five PM thing? I think we should call the sun into the boardroom and renegotiate its contract. "Sure, the getting into work earlier thing is fine, Sun, but we need you to stay right to the end of your shift every work day. Six PM. Really. That's all we're asking for. Can you do that? Can you do that for us? Because this team has to pull together, and every member is valuable. We need you performing to the maximum of your potential in order for everyone else to exercise their fullest potential. Good; I knew we could count on you."

And as for the friendly yet antagonistic distress demonstrated by people as they react to yesterday's comment regarding me not starting when I wanted to start: it's all about not writing when I want to be writing. A couple of others are running into this, too. You sit down and stare at your paper or screen, and you think, I want to be writing, but nothing happens. I wanted to write in the morning, and it didn't happen. So I did other stuff. Had I been able to write earlier, the other stuff would have been done later. Simple. And as I mentioned in response to someone's message on the boards:

Working out a daily quota helps too. Once you know how many days you have to write, divide 50K by that amount and voila, you have a word count goal for each day you write.

For example, I know that Wednesdays, Saturdays, and Sundays are write-offs for me (pun remarkably apropos). This leaves me four days per week. That's 18 writing days, which means 2778 words per day, at least. Thus, I bump it up a bit to 3K; 3K is my daily goal.

However, since writing is my day job as well, I know damn well that there are days that I experience Computer Aversion -- I can't even bear to turn the computer on, let alone sit down and work, as a result of Too Much Time Spent At The Damned Thing. According to past experience (NaNo and otherwise) I expect to lose at least two days to this. Rather than scheduling them in and assuming I will only have 16 writing days, I go as far past my daily goal as possible, so as to earn a break somewhere in the future of November. It also creates a safety net for those days where the words simply will not come, no matter how hard I try.

And you can further take comfort in the fact that my NaNo report card told me that my daily productivity had dropped to minus twelve percent after pulling off the stupid amount of 5.5K on Day One. Talk about demoralising! It is no longer a cheerful little thing; it is evil. Useful, though, damn its eyes.

Forward NaNo

The Moments of Being Pandora

Current word count: 9,617
Today's word count: 4,246
I'm on: Chapter 4
Music: All three LotR scores, plus the score to the Zeffirelli Jane Eyre
Biggest irk so far today: Hmm. Starting so late, I suppose. I puttered around a lot today -- made scones, helped HRH figure out why his laptop can do a grammar check but fails to point out any spelling mistakes (no dictionary installed - how odd is that?), did Real Work with my publisher in the US for a couple of hours in the morning, talked some writing stuff out with Ceri, went out to buy tea... I just couldn't get into the right frame of mind earlier.

Stopping now.

HRH did indeed register for his intensive computer animation certificate today; he should get a letter confirming his acceptance sometime by the end of this week. The fact that there's still some doubt as to whether he's been accepted or not bothers me. I mean, they just opened registration yesterday. I know the program takes a limited number of students, but honestly... I suppose it's just bureaucracy, and it has to go through the rest of the system.

And This Is Not The Word Guy?

It's raining. Hence HRH is home, ensconced in his chair by the window, his laptop open, his cat on his lap, coffee at his side, the gentle sounds of CBC Radio 2 drifting through the air as he writes.

"There's a problem," he just said.

"I'm having too much fun."

NaNo, NaNo...

The Moments of Being Pandora

Current word count: 4,346
I'm on: Chapter 2
Music: Return of the King film score
Biggest irk so far: My style format is screwing up the bullets which separate the sections, and the table of contents. Oh, and I switched the POV to first-person narrative. I might keep going back and forth from third to first person; haven't decided yet. And so far, it's all set-up. That's pretty irksome.

According to my NaNo report card (download Erik Benson's clever Excel spreadsheet here!), if I keep this up I'll be done on November 11.

Silly optimistic spreadsheet. I have Real Work to do, for people who pay me for writing. And I lose at least two days a week.

Still, it's a cheerful little thing, which is encouraging me onwards

NaNo 2004: Day One

It's 1:15 AM on November 1.

I have 1,526 words of my novel written.

The goal for this midnight project launch started out as 500 words, then became 1,000; then as I wrote that goal morphed into 1,100, then 1,200, and then 1,500. Yes, I revise my goals frequently when things are going well.

The first sentence?

There.

The tea won out over the wine.

And now, to bed.

PS: HRH wrote 225 words. Kudos to him.