Skip to main content

In Process: August, 2012



First Draft

“Fairfax”. Around 115K, approaching climax. 

I also have a couple of scraps of planning for this year's NaNoWriMo novel, and a lot of notes for various short stories I'd like to have time to do. More on that next month. 

Editing

The editing was going really slowly, so I took an idea from music – leave the instrument out. I’ve probably mentioned before, my oboe teacher told me to practice 10 minutes per day. If you take the instrument out every day, you’re bound to practice more than 10 minutes some of those days (or quit because you really do hate it). Anyway, so I left my editing project open to the page I’m at on my work table, just to see what would happen. 

Lo and behold, I would sit down with 45 spare minutes and mark up 20 pages or so, and stop when I got to a hard bit, and then come back and that hard bit would suddenly have a solution the next day, or a couple of days later. 

Next problem was data-entering those markups. 

My life is overly regimented, I think. Too much structured. But for the markups, I used that structure to my advantage. On Monday and Thursday, I don’t have to do yoga because it’s been done already, so I don’t turn on my computer and then turn it off to do yoga (or forget to do yoga, and then wind up doing it at 12:15 am which sucks) and then turn it on again to read the whole internet. So, Monday and Thursday when I get home from activities, I do the online editing. 

For this draft, it’s worked really well. Things that are too large to data enter properly I add to my task list – rewriting chapters and scenes, etc. 



Knitting


“Bome” (night garden) fair isle cardigan. I just attached the sleeves.  
 Spatterdash wristwarmers done.
Wine and Roses mitts done.
Biohazard (pullover) designed by me! Four inches of body, maybe?
 

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.

What I read: January 2024

"Morgan is my name" by Sophie Keech. Office book club selection. It gets exhausting to read about plucky young heroines who are terrible at needlework all the time. I should probably read some Jo Walton. I mean, you can be good at needlework and other things too! I didn't find this book very surprising. The first half was kind of boring, but it got better towards the end.  LHC #233: "The Shifter" by Janice Hardy. I read her writing advice website regularly, so I thought I should maybe read an actual book to find out if she was worth it. Oh my, the voice of this book grabbed me immediately. The worldbuilding seemed shady but the voice was solid. It wasn't very subtle, but I might not be the target audience.  LHC #234: "Ragnarok: The End of the Gods" by A. S. Byatt. At this point with my library account, I'm just guessing. I know there was something by Byatt there? I suspect there was. I did not know what to make of this book. Strange, but it w

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