Dandelyon's Worlds

I haven't been posting much, but I've been busy.  The city, as usual, wants the yard cleaned up as soon as the snow vanishes, so we've been working on the yard, both clearing up the winter's accumulation of trash and working on making the stuff that we didn't get neat in the fall is tidied up.  We still have work to do on the stone patio and the firepit, which pretty much fell in last year, but we didn't get it rebuilt.  And the firewood is a mess, and the roses are still mulched, but it's time to rake them off and bag up all those autumn leaves to roll into the compost every time we mow the lawn all summer.  And I'm working on doing vegetable gardening this year, big time, so we have to clean the beds that are already more or less designated for that purpose and decide where to put more.  We will try growing green beans (the pole type) on our more robust Japanese roses; slowing down those particular roses would be a blessing; last year we had to dig out some (very thorny) volunteer runners that came up in the lawn.  We set some concrete block between the roses and the lawn when we did that; hopefully that will prevent another incursion.  Some of the smaller roses might get lettuce or broccoli planted behind them.  I've also been tending the indoor seedlings.  A friend was ordering seeds from a catalog that has a lot of heritage varieties, and she offered to order some for me; those came in, and for the full moon, tonight I planted some tomatoes and bell peppers to start indoors, and I plan to plant spinach, peas, and onions outside tomorrow (Thursday). 

Indoors, I've been cooking, trying to make sure I have food ready when my teenager gets back from track, so she eats more than Kraft mac'n'cheese, and other indoor chores, though no big projects quite yet.  And job hunting, which takes a lot more time and energy than the few available jobs would suggest it should, besides that aspect of things being worrysome and depressing if I dwell on it.  So I try to do it and move on to other things.  And there've been ordinary medical errands, and a trip to the dentist, where the tooth that was bothering me was filled nicely, and the tooth I knew needed work, but wasn't bothering me, proved to need either extraction or a root canal and a crown; they're checking the dental insurance (which I still have, for a while, anyway) to see how much it will cover for me, so I can figure out if I can afford the crown. 

The thing I'm happiest about since new moon is the fiction writing.  I've written a piece of flash fiction and, finally, gotten back into writing the Shifter novel.  The murder victim is finally both dead and discovered, and a variety of suspects have been shown to at least one of my three main characters.  I've gotten more than 13000 new words on the Shifter since the new moon, which brings my total to 26341 words as of today's count.  I'm a bit concerned about length; I don't feel like I'm 1/4 into the story.  This is a concern because I've also been reading about the state of the publishing industry today, and apparently publishers are more likely to buy 100K stories than 200K stories these days.  Oh, well, (though I did rewrite the first four chapters after I figured out all the nasty stuff the murder victim has been up to) it IS a first draft.  And I'm enjoying these characters; the romance angle could be stretched out over more than one book, I suppose. I'm also developing the world more, and developing quite a bit of background notes so I can do stuff like keep track of the people, whether they're suspects or not.

I suppose I should get one of those widget thingys so there's a visual of how far along I am on this novel; that would be satisfying for me to look at, though I don't know if any of you care.  Of course, I have no idea where my notes on where to find one might be.  And if I have to choose between an hour spent writing the story, or an hour Googling for a fun widget, the novel wins!

Yesterday: Rewrote Chapter 1 of Shifter to change the things needed due to my revelation of early last week; deleted some words and added others. To my great surprise, the word count is identical to what it was! Then rewrote Chapter 2, added a few words, which is much more typical for me. Also talked to headhunter (in my new suit and all), but they have no interviews to send me on right now. Did slightly revise the resume per her suggestions.

Today, errands. Talked with banker about rolling over 401K. Talked with phone company about transferring stuff from old phone to new. Grocery shopping. Dishes (ugh!). Looking at various old computers with a friend, checking memory on memory cards and hardware and figuring out a keyboard is just no good and getting the new ergonomic keyboard to (finally) work on the new computer, but the older computers aren't recognizing a flash drive plugged into their USB, and the new one doesn't recognize a floppy plugged into it, so I still have to abandon the computer when the kid needs to do homework, with no real way to continue working on the same story. Sigh. Progress, but not nearly as much as I'd hoped. And I wanted to do some writing, but unsurprisingly I'm tired now.

It was good to see Felix again though, popping in and out of his cat door, and staring at his goldfish, and getting cross-eyed when the fly lands on his nose. Pity he can't "live" within newer Windows environments.

(edited because I hate typos!)

Well, I went to work, and scanned in some artwork, and called to get a replacement for the water reservoir for my CPAP as the one I'd been using broke just in time for the 4th of July (happily I had a spare, so now I need a new spare) and did banking things for my kid, and after work went grocery shopping and got out some old oil primer from the basement to start priming the back stairs, because last winter's snow and salt wore off nearly all the paint on them and I DO NOT want to have to replace them.

After work, but before leaving the office, since A borrowed the car to go get her meds, I started a new chapter on a novel I'll call Shifter for now. 

The first chapter is 2642 words so far, and not finished; it was started quite a while ago and eventually filed with other story fragments.  In the last couple of weeks, I've been writing worldbuilding snippets (story fragments are easier than spreadsheets, though I've got a couple of those too) and working on a plan for the novel; I don't have that finished, but I didn't feel like plotting today.  And the file I did on the computer at home refused to be read by the computer at work.  So I started a chapter instead.

Then, after the painting and dinner, I thought about the LJ community based on the premise that 750 words a day for 90 days is novel length.  Surely, having done a couple hundred today, I figured I could get to at least 750 for the day.  Since there weren't too many things planned for this chapter, I finished the first draft at 1011 words. (-:

I know better than to think I can do this every day, but maybe I can strive for more days than not. 

Now I better run off to bed; if I'm too tired, I won't get any writing done tomorrow!

So, this nice LJ place led me to finding out, a few scant weeks ago, that there will be a Sword & Sorceress 23 anthology, and that it would be accepting submissions for a brief time. Ending today. And I had this story idea that seemed to fit, that I'd even written an opening scene for a while back...and I've been wanting to write something where I'd planned the whole thing, and I had a paragraph-length narrative for the plot, so I determined to find my notes and the opening scene.

But then, one of the cats had fleas, and....well, life happens, you know.  Teen-ferrying and grocery shopping and all that.

Well, I found my notes, but not the story fragment. So finally, I gave up, and made a new start, and pushed through very quickly to the planned end of the story. And then slept on it, and decided it wasn't quite the end, a denouement was needed because of details that I'd added--details that I liked, mind you.  Oh, and the most exciting part was all in the wrong order, at a point where the character's understanding of what was going on was changing, so I couldn't just cut and paste paragraphs, I had to keep some of the phrases where they were, but apply them to different events.  Arrgh!  So I shuffled, carefully, and rewrote, and sought comments from my sister, whose job as an attorney was keeping her insanely busy, so I didn't get them.  So I reread and rewrote it, and slept on it and started reading it before going to pick up my kid from a ball game, and almost got so caught up in it I didn't leave when I needed to--a good sign, I thought.  So, last night I again polished it, and a friend who broke up with his girlfriend offered to read it, tho he gave me minimal comments (but they were positive ones, despite the story being far less dark than the stuff he usually reads), and I read it aloud, all the way through (nothing like that to help you catch where your edits added extra extra words or out necessary ones!) and liked it ,so, I sent it off today.  Well, OK, I changed a few words today too.  But now it's officially done, at least until I get a response from S&S.

Just under 5000 words.  Rewrites and all.  In less than two weeks, squeezed into the rest of my schedule.  Wheeeeee!

...

Gosh, I hope I still like what I wrote when the story in my mind has faded, leaving me with only the words on the page.