Toothbrush: Day 401 of the confinement

A couple of weeks ago on Monarchy was about Queen Mary and her confinement when she was confused and thought she was pregnant but really it was all in her head. This wretched novel is the same. 401 is a number pulled out of a hat of course, but still...

Today I wrote two lame scraps of the backstory into the text, and then I fell back on my favourite activity, moving sections around! Soon every scene will have been in every spot, except the first and the last!

Actually, I have this Excel spreadsheet (like apparently Justine Larbalestier suggested but doesn't really use, and that's fine, but her novels clearly don't have this massive flaw in that they... I don't even know what's wrong with it except that it's not as good as it should be) anyway, I started trying to apply a normal time frame, a schedule to events, like, you know, weekdays have to come between weekends, and you can't have a whole string of tuesdays in a row, and I couldn't even make that work properly. I know this activity of applying days of the week to sequences will help. I do. But I can't get past half-way through. Then it makes no sense and I have nothing but weekdays, and I don't even know what days they are. Arrgh.

Best TW feedback ever

Over at the dayjob, SMEs are feverishly trying to get documents back to me all marked up, in preparation for the release that's supposed to happen the week I'm back from VP. Today's best comment: Unfortunately not true. SMEs, they're so cute.

Moraine

So a couple of days I thought I was done with this short story, and I wrote the last line of the story. I even dated it (that's how I can tell it's over). It was a little long, at 6600 words (I was aiming for 5000). But then I was walking to work, and I thought, "My, that was a lame ending. My endings are all crap." So yesterday morning, I scribbled out the date and wrote a bit more. And this morning I wrote a bit more again, and I dated it and called it done. And still, that ending seemed lame. So a few minutes later, in the last paragraph, I scratched out "the Oak Ridges Moraine" and wrote in "that stupid moraine". Much better. Now I can move on. But in the meantime, I was doing a little research about the Moraine, and I discovered that EGTourGuide lives on it. Only by one or two hundred feet, but I thought it was funny. Good for you, EGTourGuide, with all those excellent plants growing on that substandard soil, where in the olden days (you kno...

What I read: March 2024

LHC #240: "Vita Nostra" by Maryna and Serhiy Dyachenko. Translated by Julia Meitov Hersey. All I knew going in was dark academia. This was a neat thing to read after A Deadly Education last month. The students can leave this school at summer and winter break, but maybe they shouldn't. Also, interesting education method, providing Sasha with a CD player and punishing her if she leaves it in the mode where it plays all the tracks in sequence. "Norse Mythology" by Neil Gaiman. When I finished Ragnarok by AS Byatt (last month? January?) I was thinking it might have made more sense if I had any knowledge of the subject matter. The boy had left this lying around, and it was not a tough read. LHC #241: "Science on a mission: How Military funding shaped what we do and don't know about the ocean" by Naomi Oreskes. I deferred this once because it was so long. History of science is challenging for me to read, because of the need to get a grasp on dispr...

Robynettely

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