30 Monday Nov 2015
Posted in Randomness
Not a real novel, not completed, not scenes that make sense at the end… but 50,000 words written in a month — 12,000 of them in the past two days — and I did learn something from it. But I’ll write about what I learned some other time, because right now, I am so done with this day.
30 Monday Nov 2015
Why, oh, why, do we use the word “taxi” to describe an airplane’s free motion along the ground? Apparently they’re traveling on land known as a “taxiway,” but why should that be called that? Maybe to differentiate it from the runway? But who chose taxi?
Also, double i is a really intrinsically weird letter construction in the English language. I wonder how many words there are that use a double i? I’m guessing not many because offhand, I can’t think of another. Ah, but Hawaii and skiing, of course, and all of skiing’s forms. Plus Shanghaiing and shiitake and alibiing. But not a lot of others. (Technically 50-some others, if you include all the ones on the word game cheat list that I just looked at, but a bunch of them are pretty dubious — Hawaiian plant names and words with no definition online, etc.)
If I had discovered the answer to the question about taxi, I’d stuff this blog post with keywords so that other people could find the answer more easily, because I’ve wasted a scary amount of time trying to discover the etymology of that phrase, but alas, I didn’t find the answer, so there’s no point.
But today is the last day of NaNo.
Achievement One: Write a blog post every day. Unlocked as soon as I hit Publish on this one.
Achievement Two: Write a 50,000 word novel entirely within the month of November. Nope. Achievement not unlocked. Maybe next year.
Achievement Three: Write 50,000 words within the month of November. I have ten hours and approximately 4500 words to go.
That’s an average of 450 words per hour. Phrased that way, it still seems possible. And since these words count, I may as well continue babbling here for a little bit longer. Overdrive — in the interests of making it impossible for me to success with Achievement #3 — very kindly auto-checked out the complete Parasol Protectorate by Gail Carriger to my iPad this morning. I’ve had to hide the iPad in the other room to discourage myself from distractions but I did read at breakfast and lunch. I read another series by her — The Finishing School series — last week, also mostly courtesy of Overdrive. It’s encouraging in some weird way to see that she has become a better writer as she’s written more books. I don’t know why exactly, except that sometimes I think I’ve gotten a lot worse, but maybe it’s just hard to see your own growth in progress? And maybe it’s just a satisfying affirmation that yes, authors grow and learn and develop, and if I’m not as good as I want to be today, that doesn’t mean I won’t be later.
Also, although perhaps less optimistically, it reminds me that I’m a good editor and I’m a good editor on my own books, too. The reason I’m saying this is that there are clunky sections in the first book of the Parasol Protectorate series — repetitions, infodumps — stuff that pretty minor edits could have fixed and it’s satisfying to me to know that I would have caught them and fixed them. It reminds me that even if this first draft that I’m working on is the worst thing ever, ever, ever, I am entirely capable of fixing it in rewrites. I wish I could remember that a little more easily. I should be more confident when I’m writing about my own skills as an editor, because that would probably let me relax a little more while I’m writing. Hmm, another useful insight.
So as I hit the end of my blogging every day month, what have I learned? I have learned that I’m probably not going to blog every day. I never check my traffic, but I bet my traffic has gone lower and lower this month as I’ve bored more people with blog posts that say nothing. I’m not even sure that I’d bother to read my own blog if it weren’t, you know, my own. But I’ve also found it really useful to blog every day as a way of beginning my writing process and also forcing myself to relax about what I write. My normal process, even with a blog post, includes a lot of revision and tweaking, but this month, there’s just no time for that. I bet it’s not even that noticeable to anyone who’s managed to keep reading. But it’s relaxing for me.
And I just drifted off to google analytics — a terrible way to spend my now less than ten hours — and yep, I’m dramatically right. The little blue line plummets at the beginning of November. That’s okay, though — it’s a nice reminder that I should blog for what I get out of it myself and not to take up other people’s time. If I worried too much about my audience I would probably stop blogging entirely, because time is a precious resource for all of us and not one that should be wasted. But I can waste my own time, because I’m getting self-analysis, writing discoveries, encouragement and experience out of it. Words, words, and more words! They count for something for me, even when they’re not useful for anyone else. (Technically, of course, all reading is good because spending your time interpreting symbols is good for our brains and keeps us mentally agile, but there are a lot of worthwhile things to read in the world — my blog does not aspire to be one of them. Not that a blog could aspire, but you know what I mean.)
Almost 1000 words on this blog post, which puts me at under 4K left to go in my nine hours and forty-five minutes. Do I have anything else to say about my blogging discoveries in the month of November? I don’t think I posted any recipes, which might just mean I wasn’t a very creative cook this month. But book reviews were obviously my fallback position — when I have nothing else to write about, there are always books. I wish that worked in real life, but it so seldom does. Never once have I survived a stilted conversation with a stranger by discovering that we both liked to read the same things. But maybe I should try more often, since I don’t think I often try the “Read anything good lately?” line. (I don’t actually wander around talking to strangers all that often, anyway.) Writing, reading, cooking, dogs — if I ever try to do the blogging every day for a month thing again, I will have to make sure to take an interesting vacation during the month!
Anyway, I’m going to get back to my attempt to produce words that will eventually go into A Gift of Grace. Tomorrow I’m going to have the fun organizational job of reading everything I’ve written in the past ten days and pulling out all the coherent bits to see how they fit together or how they can be fit together. But today I’m just going to try to write some more of those coherent bits. With any luck, Noah can get on with his confrontation with Lucas and I can get through this section and into a more fun section with Akira. More fun because Akira is always fun to write, I think, and it’s been a while since I’ve been with her.
Tomorrow — if I manage to get all the words done today — I am going to reward myself with a box of these chocolates from CostCo. I shouldn’t, because I seriously don’t need the sugar — it makes all my joints go wonky — but they are oh-so-good and I need the motivation. Yay, chocolate.
29 Sunday Nov 2015
From Judy in the comments: “Motivation is shit when you think about it. It’s fleeting, inconsistent, and unreliable. Commitment. That’s what it takes. Make the decision to better yourself every single day. Don’t rely on motivation, rely on your desire and determination to not stay where you are.” Runningmandz
Yesterday was a 3000 word count day. All the words were terrible. Some of them were a rant about how much I was hating writing and how much I was hating the book I was working on. Some of them were a feeble attempt to write a different book, which, it turned out, I Hated just as much as the real one. (I have no idea why my fingers randomly capitalized hated in that previous sentence, but I’m leaving it even though it’s wrong because it amuses me. Yes, my hate yesterday was worth of capital letters.) But I really tried to keep my fingers moving. As of today, I need to write 11,500 words in the next two days. I am willing to accept absolutely any words as an element of this goal, no matter how bad they are, despite the fact that realistically, that’s kind of stupid.
What’s the point in writing a lot of bad words? Except the point is something to do with motivation, with setting a goal and achieving it. Even if all the words are terrible words, if I’ve written fifty thousand of them in a month, I will have accomplished something. Admittedly, not the something that it would have been good to accomplish, namely finishing the first draft of A Gift of Grace. Even if it was 20,000 words, it would be better to have a solid first draft at the end of the month then a ton of unusable words. But persistence, commitment, desire and determination — as long as I keep opening up that damn file every day, I will get there in the end. Seriously, yesterday was close to giving up again, though. I have thousands of words that are basically just trying to find the next scene and no understanding of why it’s being so difficult. I feel like it should be straightforward — Noah’s got a job and is working until Akira gets back, what’s complicated about that? — but it feels super murky middle.
I suspect my real issue is that I want a lot of time to pass in the book, months ideally, and that is never my strong suit. The best I’ve ever done with that — oh, ha, the ONLY time I’ve ever done that — is “six weeks later” as the starting of the seduction scene in A Gift of Ghosts. That is literally the only time I’ve ever made significant time pass in a story. Well. Huh. Perhaps I’ve just realized why I’m spinning my wheels. That’s a useful accomplishment, go, blog post writing. But all my other books take place in literally days. In fact, I think I can go back to a blog post I was writing in the midst of Ghosts where I discuss my exact inability to make time pass. It has a name, narrative something-or-other, and apparently I still haven’t mastered the skill.
Moving on, at dinner last night, I took a break and read — well, skimmed, really — a classic Josephine Tey novel, Brat Farrar. What I wanted to read was a Ngaio Marsh mystery, having recently been reminded of those books. But unfortunately, the ebook versions that exist of Ngaio Marsh are ridiculously expensive. I hope her heirs are at least the people making the profits of those books, but I suspect it’s just a publisher. There’s a whole ocean of books that would be nice to have as ebooks — Ngaio Marsh and Agatha Christie, old Dick Francis, Elswyth Thane, Elsie Lee… — but the publisher wouldn’t have the ebook rights in the contract, since the books predate computers, giving them no motivation to make electronic editions without new contracts.
And as a business opportunity for an outsider, it’s probably risky. You’d need a good lawyer, the original contracts, clear owners of the copyrights, all for sales that might wind up being trivial. When I think about that way, it’s more obvious why Ngaio Marsh’s ebooks should be $9 each. But still, I wasn’t willing to pay. Instead, I found the Project Gutenberg library and Josephine Tey and read Brat Farrar for free. It was very soothing. The world in the book is peaceful — well, despite having a psycho murderer in it — but serene and friendly and warm. Darkness is there, all around, with tragic deaths and past wars and death duty taxes, but the sun still shines golden on the hills and riding a horse can be a sublime experience. It didn’t make me less discouraged with my own book, but it did remind me that I can relax and take my time and have some scenes that are just there to be pleasant. I don’t know what kind of crazy standard I’m trying to write to, but I think for today being reminded to take my time is a good thing.
And these words are feeling very incoherent, not to mention rambling, but that’s okay. Given that I need to write 6000 words today — a number that makes me roll my eyes — a few rambling words to begin with are probably good for me. The real issue with that ridiculous word count goal is that I’m bringing R back to his ride to school. For me, it’s a great deal. Instead of a five hour drive to bring him all the way to Sarasota, it’s a two hour drive. Hours of time saved, excellent. But on a day when I aspire to write thousands upon thousands of words, and even more hope that at least a few of them will be good and usable words, chopping out a couple hours in the middle of the day is sort of unfortunate. Of course, that’s the whole deal with NaNo in November, anyway. Losing a couple days to cooking a big dinner is not so efficient, although if I wasn’t the cook, having the holidays would probably be really nice to increase my word count. I bet a lot of writers with full-time jobs pack their Black Fridays with words, words, and more words.
Anyway, the real issue with losing time to the drive is not so much the drive, but the coming home to an empty house. It’s so nice to have R here. I still wind up spending a lot of my time cloistered away at my computer, but when I wander out to the kitchen, I enjoy the company and the conversation. I suspect that when I return to the empty house, I will have to go through a period of being sad before I can settle my head back into Tassamara.
However, that gives me a new goal — to finish Grace before he comes home again for Christmas. It would be so extraordinarily nice to have a final draft of this book completed. At this point, having spent over a year working on it, it’s almost impossible to imagine. It’s the book from hell. It will never end, it will never make sense, I will always have dozens of paragraphs (good paragraphs) that simply don’t fit in anywhere at all… how’s that for pessimistic? Yesterday, when I was trying to get the new version of ALM finalized, I wound up organizing some files and I found some great scenes from Grace that I wrote a while ago. Truly, great scenes. Unfortunately, completely USELESS because I went in a different direction when I wrote and they no longer make sense, but they were very well-written. *sigh*
Okay, time to stop whining. There are two more days left in November and I have the desire and the determination to use them wisely. Waiting for meaning to spring full-blown into my imagination hasn’t been working, so instead I’ll be pouring out the words as fast as my fingers can move and hoping that eventually all my babble will start cohering into something meaningful. Or fun, anyway.
I believe this post gets the Boring tag. Someday soon I will be updating Goodreads with all the books that I’ve read in November — a list that includes the entire Finishing School series by Gail Carriger, the entire Paladin’s Legacy series by Elizabeth Moon, and alas, some other library books that I already don’t remember. Drat. Yeah, Overdrive was both a good and a bad discovery for me. But if I don’t reach 50,000 words (not that I’m giving up — I’ve got 38 hours left!), I sure will have read a lot of books — at least 15 in November, not counting the ones that I didn’t write down, so probably closer to 20. Maybe I should have called it National Novel Reading Month instead of Writing Month? That would have worked better for me.
Gah, I should not have wasted the past twenty minutes on Goodreads. No time for reviewing books! On to writing. And still thinking positive — I can do this, really I can! Desire and determination, that’s all we need, right?
Edited to add: I went looking for the narrative something-or-other post and it’s called narrative summary. My post was nothing special, except for the link to Patricia Wrede’s site where she usefully explains different aspects of the technique. It’s worth a read.
28 Saturday Nov 2015
Posted in NaNo
Approximately 15,000 more words.
Likelihood of success: low.
But not zero! I’ve had three very low word count days in a row, so maybe they can be followed by three very high word count days. It’s a goal, anyway. Yesterday I really intended to write, but I spent the morning working on formatting A Lonely Magic for print and in the afternoon, I was seriously tired. Not because formatting is so difficult, although it is a job for a perfectionist, but because Thanksgiving really does take a lot. It’s not the cooking that’s the problem, although my gravy took an awful lot of stirring, but when you’re feeding eleven people in a house where usually a big meal involves three people, there are a host of other chores. Like moving furniture around, setting up tables, dragging chairs in from the garage, getting the step stool out about a hundred dozen times to retrieve the good china from the top shelves, and then the serving dishes, and then the trivets, and then the search for the serving platters… I even ironed the tablecloths because they really, really needed it. When I think, oh, it’s just cooking a turkey, sure, that’s no big deal, but in fact, there’s a lot of movement and carrying involved with setting up a big meal.
So yesterday I was tired and today, to be honest, I’m still tired. I would happily have another day of zoning, maybe even some television watching. But instead I am going to write, because I think I could still finish NaNo. Not the real thing, of course, but the 50,000 words of one form or another.
In other blog post news… nope, got nothing. I posted the new cover of ALM yesterday and couldn’t figure out a way to ask if people saw Fen’s face without, you know, actually asking and making it obvious, so I am left to wonder how many people missed it. But I feel like ALM and everything around it needs to become for me a thing that I can love so much that no one else’s reaction matters.
That’s an aspirational position, of course — I’m a hard-core people pleaser, so I want other people to love the things I love — but it’s good for me. It’s… hmm, I can feel myself wandering into one of those deep psychological self-analysis moments, tied to middle school and moving a lot, managing friendships, and so on, but I’m going to resist the temptation because it’s not getting the writing done that I want to get done. If I’m not writing Grace, I should be setting up Christmas lights while a super-tall person is available to help me with them. Well, a super-tall person and also a handy spotter for roof-climbing purposes. I don’t mind going on the roof, but I like to know that someone’s there to call 911 should I fall and break my neck. Or really any bones. Doesn’t have to be the neck.
Right, back to Grace. Many words to be written today, so off I go to write them. If you’re a fellow NaNo’er, also not finished, good luck today. Write lots!
27 Friday Nov 2015
Posted in A Lonely Magic, Cover design, Grace, NaNo, Self-publishing
Several days ago, I mentioned that I had — impulsively — commissioned a fifth cover for A Lonely Magic. Yes, insane impulse, I know. How many covers does one book really need? The short answer is five, because I am so absolutely pleased with this cover that I can’t imagine ever looking at it and not feeling a thrill of satisfaction.
Jake at jcalebdesign is phenomenal. He took the info I gave him and got creative, and then he took my absolute nitpicking insanity and managed five or six more rounds of design, changing and tweaking and never telling me that I was a pain and always trying to deliver what I was looking for. I am so pleased that at Thanksgiving dinner yesterday, I actually picked this cover as the thing I was thankful for — well, and then added my delightful son and darling dogs and lovely family and terrific guests. I’m not a total ingrate about all the blessings in my life. I’m just counting this cover as one of them right now, because it makes me happy to finally have my feelings about this book captured in an image.
And now I have to go reformat A Lonely Magic for print, because I want a paper copy of it with this cover.
Sometime today I’m also going to be trying to write like mad to catch up for my two NaNo days devoted to Thanksgiving dinner instead of word count, but I’m also feeling this great impatience to be done with Grace and Noah. I really, really want to get back to writing A Precarious Balance right now!
26 Thursday Nov 2015
Posted in Randomness
As I said to a friend, it’s tough to go wrong with a holiday that includes lots of yummy food. My turkey is in the oven, cooking away and making the house smell delicious. This morning I made balsamic roasted brussels sprouts with shallots and walnuts, and yesterday I made cranberry sauce and mashed white sweet potatoes with rosemary and garlic. The sweet potatoes are my attempt to have a facsimile of real mashed potatoes because I am going to try very hard to stick to my food restrictions today. No nightshades! No alcohol and no grains! But eh, I’m sipping a very lovely peppermint mocha that R just made for me, so I guess I am having chocolate and dairy. So it goes. Still sticking to the no nightshades, no gluten.
I hope that all of your Thanksgivings are lovely, filled with things to be grateful for, whether that’s food or friends or simply a roof over your head and a body that’s still breathing. (And reading, too!)
25 Wednesday Nov 2015
How is it that when your day is mapped out to the minute — when you’re planning morning writing from 9-10, yoga at 10, grocery store at 12, cranberry sauce on the stove and simmering by 1, furniture rearranging, bathroom cleaning, vacuuming, silver polishing, dinner planning, picking up the kid, table arranging, dinner, clean-up, potatoes prep, all on a time table that includes no room for anything extra — how is that on that day the dog can magically wander through a plant that leaves dozens of tiny burrs in her fur? On other days when I’m feeling scheduled to the max, she’s been known to roll in opossum poop, which demands immediate and extensive bathing. No way around it. And the burrs shed little black seeds which means the morning vacuuming that I already started is being defeated with every step the dog takes.
Sigh. It’s like a toddler knowing exactly the wrong time to throw a tantrum, exactly the moment when you are least able and willing to be patient. Of course, that’s probably some psychological principle along the lines of always thinking the line you’re in is the slowest — not objectively true, but just the way it feels. But it does feel like I don’t want to spend the next twenty minutes pulling burrs out of Z’s fur.
Reframing for positivity — how lucky I am that I get to spend several minutes caring for my darling dog. Admittedly, she’s not so enthusiastic when she sees the brush come out, but she likes the petting at the end. We’ll both survive.
R comes home today. I woke up feeling happy and joyful. B came on the long walk with us and never flagged — my positive messages to him of how strong he is, what a survivor, so healthy are maybe getting through. At least to me, since I am, in fact, the person who decides how long a walk he’s going to get. But he did great, stayed with us the whole way and never pulled his sit-down-and-refuse-to-move protest.
And that’s all I’ve got, because I have to go pull burrs out of the dog’s fur now. Wish us luck!
24 Tuesday Nov 2015
My mom would be 73 today. I both wish she could be here to celebrate the day and am so grateful that she isn’t. She’d been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s about a year before she died, so she’d be five years into that diagnosis by now. It made her so unhappy — not the diagnosis alone, I don’t think, but the feeling of losing who she was. Unless something had radically changed, she would not be glad to be four years farther down that road.
That said, I miss her. We weren’t a family who celebrated much — for most of the years where I lived far away, she got a phone call on her birthday and not much more. I wish I could go back and send her more sappy cards, the kind that told her how much I loved her and how grateful I was for how she loved me. I seriously offended R once when I said that I felt like the people who loved me most as me were all dead, but the love of a parent for a child is so different than the love of a child for a mother. Some day he’ll get it, but not, of course, until I’m dead.
That’s kind of bleak, though — I am again violating my sending positivity into the universe rule! So positivity — when I was a kid, my mom was the very best in our neighborhood at pulling teeth. She used to joke that she became a nurse because when she was little, she’d been sick and she’d had to get so many shots that she decided when she grew up, she’d be the other person on the end of the needle. But she was good on the other end of the needle, or the tooth as it were, because she did not flinch. One quick yank and that tooth would be out. You could get sympathy and a popsicle afterwards, but in the moment, you got brisk efficiency and matter-of-fact toughness.
My dad doesn’t like games — of any sort, really. He says he doesn’t like the feeling that he’s being manipulated. But my mom enjoyed them. We’d play cards at my maternal grandparents’ house, pinochle mostly, and sometimes Monopoly. But my favorite game to play with her was Mastermind. We usually played that at my other grandparents’ house. (Both sets of grandparents lived in the same town, so that’s where we went on vacation most often.) Of all the people that I could play with back then — siblings, grandparents, cousins — she was my favorite because we were so evenly matched. Both of us could usually get the answer in six moves, and sometimes less, and neither of us made mistakes in scoring. I don’t know how much alike my mom and I were in general — my feeling is not very much alike — but we were in the way we approached puzzles and games.
When she was dying, unconscious, close to the end, I was talking to my dad, I think, about how magical she always made Christmas when we were little. Undoubtedly helped by the fact that the grandparents lived in Bethlehem, PA, which is a town that takes the holiday seriously, but truly, my memories of childhood Christmas are sparkling and sweet, cookies and fun and laughter and lights. She tried to sit up and her hand tightened on mine. I don’t know what she was trying to say, but I’m glad she got to hear how much I treasured those memories and credited her for creating them for us.
The last thing she said to me was a few days earlier, similar circumstances, talking to my sister, thinking she was beyond hearing, until she sat up and said, “love you,” without opening her eyes. I feel really blessed to have gotten that moment, that time. I miss her so much, but I know I was lucky to have her for as long as I did.
My sister called a few days ago and said my nephew might have to work on Thanksgiving. My dad called this morning and he’s sick, doesn’t think he’ll be healthy enough in time to come to dinner. It’s still going to be a nice meal, of course, but… eh, I should probably go buy some cheap leftover dishes, so I can send them lots of food.
And I should probably get on with Noah’s words. I was working on a scene this morning with Rose, and it was really fun. I need to get back to it, because fun is good!
23 Monday Nov 2015
Posted in Randomness
…is not a good time to go shopping at CostCo. Unless you’re very fond of big crowds, free samples, and holiday temptation.
I hate crowds, can’t eat most of the free samples for one food reaction or another, but oh, did I succumb to the holiday temptations. After over a year of trying to follow the auto-immune protocol diet, I’ve eased up on some of the restrictions. All grains are bad for me, alas, and so are nightshades, sugar, and alcohol. But I don’t seem to have strong reactions to nuts; I cannot live without chocolate; and smoked salmon is basically the food that keeps me happy. So for lunch, I had a salad with mixed greens, smoked salmon, radishes, cucumber and black olives, followed by several nibbles of a snack mix that included dried apple, cranberry, pecans and cashews in a pumpkin pie spice blend (so yum!) and a single dark chocolate caramel with sea salt. Well, I say single now — I suspect I’ll be having another before dinner. I also got some of my Christmas shopping done and stocked up on sparkling water and cider. Considering that I went to CostCo to pick up avocados and chicken, I’m feeling very self-indulgent. And also like I want to take a nap, but I’m trying not to think about that.
I didn’t get a lot of words done yesterday, but that was okay, because I went to bed Saturday night absolutely stuck — pretty close to the give up in despair stage. I reread what I’ve written so far to try to get rid of my block and amused myself thoroughly but I felt like I was working with a mixed-up pile of jigsaw pieces and gradually discovering that really, I have pieces of three or four different puzzles, with not enough pieces to make any of the puzzles work.
My Idea of the other day was not enough Idea to carry me through. It was good, but not good enough. Yesterday, however, I had Another Idea. And Idea #1 plus Idea #2 — they might just add up to a complete story. However, I had to play with them for a while, explore their shapes, and see what pieces might work with them, and none of that part of the process involves words on paper for me. Or pixels on screen, or whatever. It involves washing dishes and staring into space and walking dogs and sometimes closing my eyes and hiding my face in a pillow. Despite the lack of words, I’m feeling better about the whole writing thing today than I did on Saturday.
I am enjoying the way I’m approaching the whole NaNo thing now, too. It’s sort of fun to be able to track the way my sentences take shape on the page.
Example from earlier today:
Lucas didn’t finish the sentence. “I don’t. But I didn’t mean to make light of your experience.”
“But I didn’t mean to trivialize your
“But I didn’t mean to dismiss
“I don’t. Not really. I shouldn’t have treated your feelings as if they didn’t matter.”
“I don’t. And I shouldn’t have acted like losing your friend, especially how you lost him, wasn’t important.
“I don’t. And I shouldn’t have acted like your friend—losing him and especially how you lost him—mattered less than my son.”
No wonder it takes me so damn long to write! That’s not even an important scene, not really. It’s giving some closure to the Lucas/Noah antagonism so it’s not left hanging, but it’s not the core story — I think Lucas basically turned into a red herring or some equivalent thereof — but this scene between them is minor. And yet it took me six tries to get that sentence where I want it to be. I’m not even sure it’s there yet — I don’t like Lucas describing himself as “acting” so I may still be tweaking more. I guess I know why I’m so bad at NaNo.
And obviously, I should try to overcome my need to write sentences six times, but I think that’s part of how I think. The first sentence is wrong — it doesn’t accurately describe what Lucas did. The second sentence is wrong, because the language isn’t right for Lucas. Trivialize sounds academic and he’s more direct than that. Dismiss makes him sound like a lawyer; feelings makes him sound like a girl (which is probably sexist of me, sorry); the next sentence is too vague. Finally I come to one that I can accept. But I had to think through the possibilities to get there. Of course, that does make it pretty clear that my real problem is overthinking. Sigh.
Anyway, moving on before I start editing myself, it was cold enough this morning that I wore gloves, a hat and a scarf while walking the dog. It’s nice to have autumn arrive just in time for Thanksgiving. It does make the season feel closer to right. The dogs were bouncing along like puppies. When we got home, after breakfast, Zelda actually wanted to play ball for a while, which is not her usual morning routine at all. But it made me happy to be having her chase the ball and skid around the floors. In two months, she’ll turn twelve and whenever I think about that, I feel anxious. I know better than to dwell on sad future moments, but time passes too quickly when dogs are involved. And really, I shouldn’t let a joyful moment turn into fear of the future — this morning, the dogs were playful and we had fun so yay, autumn.
And now time to get back to the words that matter. Or maybe to the research that I have to do for Idea #2. I definitely need to do some research but is it just an excuse to spend some time browsing? But better browsing than napping, I suppose!
22 Sunday Nov 2015
Posted in A Lonely Magic, Cover design, Food, Writing
Sometimes it’s so hard to open up the file and start typing. I wish I knew why. I read The War of Art recently, subtitled “Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Creative Battles” and about all I can remember from it is a sort of religious idea of creativity, with Resistance being the devil’s handiwork. More or less. Really, probably less, I’m totally reading into it. But I remember nothing that tells me why I experience such resistance or what to do about it. Except, of course, to just open the damn file and start typing.
A few weeks ago I was on reddit and a cover designer posted a $30 cover offer for NaNo. On a total impulse, I took him up on it. For, of all things, A Lonely Magic. This will be the… fifth cover. I had to count on my fingers. Ugh. I should stop blaming the cover for the book’s lack of success — I worked in the business long enough to know that some books just don’t sell. Wrong time, wrong book, wrong opening, wrong blurb — it’s impossible to know why. It’s just the nature of the business.
But my Law of Attraction friend told me that I needed to be positive about the cover, to send out vibes into the universe that said “sparkling and magical” and to have faith that the cover would be, finally, the cover of my dreams. It would help, I suppose, if I knew what my dreams were. Anyway, I got a first design yesterday, and then a second pass at that design in the evening, and I’m actually rather impatiently waiting for the third pass. It’s different. I have no idea whether it will sell any books. But I’m definitely pleased with my $30 investment. (I’ll post it, obviously, when I get a final version.)
And now I should stop letting my Resistance run away with me. Yesterday I didn’t write a single word on Grace and today I need to do better. As well as doing all those chores I didn’t get to yesterday, including getting ready for Thanksgiving dinner. Yes, four days in advance! But I like to make it easy on myself by having almost everything prepped in advance. Last year, there were nine of us, and by the time people arrived, I had the kitchen close to clean, and by seven PM, it was back to normal. I aspire to do the same this year, with ten people, which means planning. But this year it ought to be really easy — I’ve got people bringing stuffing, mashed potatoes, sweet potato casserole, rolls, and two kinds of dessert. I’m on turkey, cranberry sauce, and gravy, but will probably add brussel sprouts and maybe salad, just to give myself more to do. Hmm, maybe I’ll make an appetizer? But I already know that my guests are happy as long as the turkey, stuffing, and pie are there, so I don’t really have much to worry about.
Resistance is writing about Thanksgiving dinner when I should be writing Grace. But if you know of any interesting Thanksgiving appetizers, please share them with me!