scribbling damselfly

What is it about cafes? Are they pathologically incapable of hiring staff who can spell? I've stopped counting the crimes against apostrophes (its/it's usually takes a real beating in a cafe menu), but this one was new to me:

do you think perhaps they meant renowned? because being renowned is very different from being known, forgotten, then re-known

Apologies for the extended silence; it was unavoidable.

I've not been idle while I wasn't here, but madly revising a novel and crying out "What was I thinking?! No, really, can you read this sentence and make a guess at what I might have been thinking? It doesn't seem to have a verb in it, so it's not conveying much in the way of information"… well, it doesn't make for exciting micro-blogging, really.

One thing I did discover was that my camera has a sepia setting, among other customisable settings.¹ So of course I spent some time running around, taking photos on random settings. Naturally, a large percentage of these photos were of the cats.

Sometimes the delay on a digital camera gives you that perfect moment's capture

Max was a little (okay a lot) more boring, but gee sepia suits brown cats

1. Okay, I knew it had customisable settings. It just took me a while to find them. Little buggers were hidden. You know, beneath the MENU button. Who woulda thunk to look there?

…it gets inestimably better.

Today, after a day at the dayjob which could be best described as ugly, I arrived home to a package. Two, actually. One was the new DAAS DVD (which, let's face it, you all knew I was going to shell out for, didn't you?), and the other… well, I'll give you a clue.

It's printed. It's bound. It has my name on it. And lo, it is SHINY.

Let the record show that these sorts of surprises are excellent. I approve.

Since my ever-thoughtful editor also included a cover flat for me, this means I can belatedly deliver on my promise to reveal the cover. (Click to see it larger!)

Oh dear lord, people. It's a book.

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 Amalia¹ 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 Brutus² 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

1. I realise that none of you, save for my beta readers, know of Amalia, but I have enough trouble as it is talking about books that have no titles
2. Incidentally, there's a new girl at the dayjob who, on hearing me talk of Spawn and Brutus, gave me a horrified look and said, 'They're children? I thought you were talking about dogs!'

Some little while ago (by which I mean I forget precisely when), my cousin travelled to Africa, and spent some time volunteering at an orphanage. These are two of my absolute favourite photos of her time helping out at the Kilimani Nursery.

Is it the shorts? Is it the single shoe? Is it the way he has his hands folded? Or is it the sublime expression on his face?

I utterly adore this image

These are the sorts of photos which make me spend all my money on travelling, sooner or later.

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…"¹

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?

1. Some authorial exaggeration is to be expected here. Never let the facts get in the way of a good story is what I say.

I'm back! Did you miss me?

It's been a strange and (sadly, for the sake of my deadlines) largely but not entirely unproductive little while. Here, have a quick, incoherent, and utterly non-linear recap:

I met a girl by the name of Emma, and discussed with her the wondrous situation she enjoyed of being ungoogleable.¹ I then spent the rest of that evening marvelling at Emma's inattentiveness when — after listening to her mobile phone ring, to ensure she had given out her number correctly — we received a call from none other than Emma, opening with the phrase… "Hey, I just had a missed call from this number. Who is this? Oh! You! Yeah, did you need something…? Then why did you call…?"

I often found myself in front of awesome trees. Seriously. Look.

this tree is totally made of win

I found myself captivated by a ute bearing the sticker "UTERUS"² and spent probably far too much time trying to work out just what, exactly, the ute's owner was trying to convey with this epic fail of a pun.

This snippet of footpath graffiti also captured my attention.

it's the singular but glaring grammatical issue which intrigues me

I walked into a bookstore with a $20 voucher, and walked out with $80 of books. I wanted to walk out with $140 of books, but restrained myself. The mathematically canny will already have worked out that the actual amount I should have paid is $60. In actual fact, owing to the fact that the gift voucher in question was apparently rare as hen's teeth, processed differently in different stores, crashed the system once, and accidentally cancelled once, I may have paid $20, $40, $60, or any combination thereof. We'll see when the credit card statement arrives, I suppose.

1. To truly understand this, you'd need to know her surname, which I shan't share with you because imagine my horror if I suddenly made her googleable? It would be a travesty! It wouldn't happen, because that is the magic of her surname, but you'll just have to trust me on this one.
2. I did take a photo, but I won't inflict it on you as the bumper sticker was too grainy, owing to the fact that I was driving at the time and couldn't spare a great deal of finesse for the fine art of photography. Oh yeah, photographing while driving. I live on the edge. You know it.

There are allegedly horses at the races. This may or may not be true. I certainly was always under the impression that there were horses at the races (except, obviously, the greyhound races…) but if that's the case how is it I saw no horses? Perhaps there were no horses. Perhaps it has all been a huge lie. Perhaps there is a deep and insidious plan at work.

If there is a deep and insidious plan at work, I suspect it is not very deep. I say this because the level of distraction required to ensure no one noticed there were no horses was simply the provision of alcohol, and girls. Girls in frocks, girls in police uniforms, girls with hats and fake tans and ankle-breaking heels.

Not too much alcohol, however, or there will be Stern Words:

Apparently, there comes a point in your life where you don't get asked for ID when entering a bar. I had always heard this. I have reached and passed that point. Interesting.

Pubs are still full of brash young men. Some of them — the peacocks, as it were — will even sing Italian opera for you, if you… well, actually, I don't think he was given any invitation or incentive so much as he found an unexpected lull in the conversation.

The singing peacocks are still preferable, however, to the sodden older drunks who leer down your top in a misguided attempt to strike up conversation over your necklace. Particularly when the necklace in question contains the compassionate mantra and said sodden older drunk, on hearing the english transliteration, starts waxing lyrical about how he's always wanted to find his inner sexuality.

People shouldn't give me such openings. Ridicule will most assuredly follow. I cannot be held responsible for any emotional scarring which might result.

Turns out, everyone has a burglary story. They've been entertaining (for values of entertaining = horrifying) me all week with them. At least our burglar did not decide to pour the contents of the fridge over all the clothing and electrical equipment he didn't bother to take with him, as happened to one of my colleagues.

Strange what you find yourself grateful for.

Anyrate, on a more cheerful topic: Remember Lily?

She's grown in the two weeks since I last saw her. Lookit — she's now taller than a drinking cup!

And another picture, because I couldn't resist the cuteness of that little face.

The coloured tags mark out the pages which were too tricksome to fix on the first pass. Tricksome could mean the fix involved multiple pages, or finding a more elegant phrase which refused to come to mind at the time, or even that the fix simply required more from me than inserting a missed comma and thus was more than my sleep-deprived brain could handle that particular night. In other words, some will not actually be tricksome. Here's to hoping the latter form the majority of the fixes remaining!

But I do not think I will be working on the manuscript today. For today I came home to a smashed pane on the front door, and a ransacked house.

So far as I can see, they've only taken my jewellery, some loose cash, my old iPod, my chargers (ipod, mobile phone, and digital camera — I'll miss those until I can replace them!), and my backpack to carry it all out in. The jewellery is a blow, not because it was worth all that much but because of the sentimental value: every piece I had was a gift from someone precious to me. I'm somewhat astonished that they didn't take the laptop, which was sitting in plain view, or the LCD monitor of the desktop. It's possible, however, that I surprised them and they were still in the house when I came home — which is not a particularly pleasant thought.

I have spent the afternoon cleaning up after their mess, and the police forensic fellow's dust, and tonight I plan to enjoy a hot shower and some TV watching. Preferably involving crims getting their comeuppance.

Max thought the forensic police officer had placed all that lovely dust on the table in the sunshine just for him to loll about in. Helpful critter.