Skip to main content

In process -- January 2012

First Draft

“Fairfax”. Started month with 54,000 words, near the end of Chapter 20. Now it’s around 61K, in Chapter 23. Lots of stuff has happened, which is good. I’ve moved some of the characters finally out of their comfort zones, and created lots of problems for them. I think I will be going over my initial draft target of 90K.

“The X Tree” (where X is whatever the tree is; When I started I hadn’t quite figured that out yet). This short story came out of a chat with another TW. And also I wanted to try e-prime. When I was at VP, Jim MacDonald went through a few pages of my manuscript and pointed out every instance of “There was” etc. I remember despairing. We’ll see if, long term, this experiment improves the quality of my first drafts. I carried this around to work and stuff with the intention of writing on it when my computer was rebooting and things like that, but it didn’t quite work out.

On the weekend I just sat down and wrote until the draft was finished (total: 7000 words or so, on the weekend I probably wrote 1700) because I have a karate essay to write, and this was in its way in my brain.

Editing

Nothing. Bad writer!

Knitting

“Joy” from Rowan Vintage Knits. Back done. I was reluctant to do the beads, but now that I am, I’m loving it.

Popular posts from this blog

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...