The problem with drinking while working is that it can quickly turn into just plain drinking, and from there it's a short stumble to "work? what? yes, of course, definitely pour me another."
Er…oops.
To keep things language-focussed, I did start a new game of awarding "vocabulary points" to those who used neglected or difficult or otherwise-impressive words, which resulted in our drunken conversation being relatively highbrow. (Although I must admit, toward the end of the night, the words did get harder to pronounce. This is when I started up the corollary game of awarding "enunciation points".) And I made everyone play freerice (which has evolved from being just about vocabulary and is now also about maps, chemical symbols, learning foreign languages, and artwork), so although we were drunken idjits, we were charitable drunken idjits.
At least I managed to get half of my words for the day before becoming totally delinquent, so that should help minimise today's catch-up.
In the meantime, the evolution of vampire moths is unspeakably cool.
On The Steps Of The Palace (Into The Woods)
3 November 2008 @ 16:09 |
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After much procrastination, both before and during the session, and some 1200 words revised, a particularly muddy section of the second novel of The Binding is now officially fixed. The first draft had Amalia being evil, when really she's just impulsive and spiteful, so now all the evil occurs at her brother's instigation. This works much, much better, and quite frankly I'm not sure why I didn't realise that first time around. Who knows. Writers is nuts, after all.
Of course, 1200 words revised only puts me slightly over halfway towards today's have-to target, and only a smidge over one-third of the way towards today's would-love-to target. That would be because I still have lots of catching up to do.
Spawn and Brutus are visiting, you see, and by golly are they timesinks. Yesterday while I sat writing, Spawn emptied the cupboard, one hairclip at a time, narrating each object all the while. Hair clip! Hair clip! One two many hair clip! Medicine, for sore! Soap! I never realised I had so much in that cupboard, to be honest. Once she'd done all of that she dug out my shoes and my bag and said, That shoe, that bag, find choo choo train now?
We took her to see model steam trains on the weekend, you see, and we haven't heard the end of it since. She was so insistent that on Monday night we found ourselves at the local train station, watching trains come and go, for over an hour. I suspect the people at the station were starting to wonder if we didn't have a television and this was our next best cheap entertainment option.
This pic is totally unrelated to the post. I just visited the zoo recently, and who doesn't love otters. If you can count three, there's nothing wrong with your eyesight
Everytime (Glen Hansard & Colm Mac Con Iomaire — Even Better Than the Real Thing 2)
29 October 2008 @ 14:41 |
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My editor sent back the proofs with a few queries and additional suggested changes, so I spent yesterday slicing and dicing words and chapters.
LOTS of markup. To my surprise, however, this was a quick page to get through. Go figure.
Some I've-lost-count-pages later, it is done and all the chapters are of much less variable proportions. Subconsciously I must have known what I was doing, since I didn't have to chop any scenes to get the chapters to line up, but consciously I suspect my chapter formation process is along the lines of "How many pages since I last inserted a page break? Can't remember. This'll do. What do you mean I can't have a 300 page chapter followed by a 3 page chapter? The 300 page chapter has scene breaks, after all…"
Thank the lord for editors, is all I can say!
Today, my brain feels like mush, but it's straight back to revisions on the sequel for me. I am having a dreadful time resisting the urge to start the revisions again from the first page each time I do an edit-pass on Shadow Queen and figure out some new writerly tic I need to eradicate. For example, I suspect I have an aversion to joining words so deep-seated it makes my eternally patient editors and proofreaders weep with frustration. Um…oops?
It's The End Of The World As We Know It (R.E.M. — The Very Best of MTV Unplugged)
22 October 2008 @ 10:39 |
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My immune system is at war, and it appears to be a protracted siege rather than a single onslaught. I was ill on Friday, fine yesterday, and ill again today. This is not my idea of a rollicking good time, let me tell you that much! While ill today, I managed to watch Peter Jackson's King Kong (which, no, I hadn't seen before now) and I will say this much of the movie: was it, in actual fact, seven millennia long? I think dinosaurs evolved, rampaged and died during the screening of that movie. Granted, the illness may have been screwing with my timesense, but even so. EVEN SO.
Tab-closing:
I discovered this awesome photo through Stephen Fry's twitterstream. Which reminds me, my cousin took a couple of humdinger photos while she was over in Africa; must see if she'll let me post them on the blog.
I dropped by Elizabeth Bear's blog this morning, for the first time in ages, to discover this post on outrage and cynicism.
Telling people who are outraged that their naivete is mockable is the moral equivalent of telling a teenager with a desire to become an artist that they're better off getting a secretarial job than trying for a scholarship, and they should plan for disappointment. Of course they're going to be disappointed. Life is about disappointment.
Living life well is also about doing something about that disappointment. And trying to stop people from making the world better makes us into people who suck.
Word.
And now, since I am feeling betterer enough to blog, it's time to try and get some work done on the novel.
The Dress Looks Nice On You (Sufjan Stevens — Seven Swans)
19 October 2008 @ 17:42 |
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Oy vey. The start of this novel really is problematic. I would cry "What was I thinking?" except I suspect the answer is that I wasn't thinking. Or rather, I was thinking too much, and not finding the answers I needed, and therefore reduced to feeling my way. I'm hoping that once I sort out the opening chapters, it will start to flow a little more smoothly. At least the retaliative catch-up strike is proceeding apace, yesterday's virus notwithstanding.
Right now, the television is blaring about Kath & Kim — The American Version, the circularity of which makes me cringe. I have never understood the American urge to take a successful tv show, staff it with American writers, cast and crew, and reshoot it. Is it meant to be an homage? Is it meant to sanitise American television of anything non-American? Is it related to the publishing trend Justine was talking about a couple of days back? Do other countries do this and I'm simply not aware of it?
And why oh why does Australian tv feel the need to air our original series back to back with the American remake?
I grow old, I grow old
I shall wear the bottom of my trousers rolled
18 October 2008 @ 20:41 |
6 Comments
Belated apologies for my silence over the past couple of days. Somehow (it might, I dunno, just maybe, have something to do with the increased connection speed I am currently enjoying) I managed to exceed my internet plan's quota, which means every extra byte is costing ludicrous amounts of money. Oops.
You might think that having no internet would allow me to be more productive, but alas, you would be wrong. Procrastination always finds a way. I did manage to mail the Shadow Queen proofs back to the publisher, which has left my desk startlingly clear. Seriously. Two stacks of paper each 400 odd pages deep takes up a lot of room. I'd forgotten the top of my desk was that colour.
With the proofs gone, I'm now free to start concentrating on the revisions to the sequel, which have been languishing unloved and unattended for far too long. And by "far too long", I naturally mean "this book was due in June 08".
Oops.
On the upside, I am promised sunshine and lots of it today, so I think I shall enjoy the benefits of laptop ownership (can you believe the burglar missed the laptop?!) and work outside. Huzzah!
20 September 2008 @ 9:40 |
This writing caper would be a whole lot easier if my process was linear, and I knew all the character's motivations and plot events and whatnot before writing the book. Instead, here I am, floundering in the shallows of the revisions, and I still don't entirely know what is motivating two of the characters. Two fairly substantial characters. How did I make it all the way through the alpha and beta drafts without knowing what they were up to? It's a mystery to me. I have spent a goodly portion of the afternoon pondering and musing and brainstorming, but so far to little avail. Blergh.
The Rainbow Connection (Kermit the Frog)
23 August 2008 @ 19:06 |
4 Comments
One of the hardest parts about a revision, I find, is simply starting the dang thing. The whole concept is just too daunting. There are so many things to fix, and in my abortive fledgeling novels said fixes are never just a simple one-line tweak but rather involve complicated novel-length rearrangements and convolutions and the memory capacity of, well… an all-remembering thing.
Yeah, kinda fell over there, didn't I? It happens.
So this afternoon I have done what I should have done days ago: I printed out the novel onto paper and skimmed/read it, noting down a very rough outline. (This would be the sequel to Shadow Queen, for those keeping track.) I don't know why I've avoided the print-it-out trick before now, because it really is the best thing to wrap my head around the plot and where I can insert scenes and where I can delete them, and what I wanted to change and what my beta readers think I need to change… In other words, when I print it out on paper, it's not so daunting any more.
So, note to self, for future revisions (because, hey, I'll forget again, in time for the next revision): Stop hesitating. Smoosh the margins and reduce the font and print two pages to a sheet if you must, but just print it out already. You know you need to.
9 August 2008 @ 19:45 |
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