SF and Fantasy Writer
NaNo: 2450 words or so on Saturday, a few tapped out in the afternoon while the wife and kid ran errands (and after a lovely brunch), and a few in the evening. The novel sailed on past 21,000 words. It’s zoom zoom zooming along, and soon things start to get truly crazy in novel-land.
Daylight Saving Time ended. So my kid didn’t actually get me up at 6:50 am; he got me up at 5:50 am. And to think I once liked falling back, for that extra hour of sleep…
NaNo: Wrote 2,060 words yesterday. My total for the month so far is about 8700 words (and since I already had 10K written… well. We’re looking at a fifth of a book done, more or less.) I would have written more, but good entertainment conspires against me. I’m reading the new King novel, and my wife and I are finishing off The Good Wife season 2 on DVD. So I read/watched instead of write-write-writing. But I exceeded my minimum for the day, so all’s well.
Nobody reads the internet much on weekends anyway, so I’ll leave it at that.
NaNo: I wrote another 2500 words or so yesterday, a tiny bit while my son was eating his lunch, most in the evening. Not bad considering I also grocery shopped, played Legos with my son for hours, spent a long time at the library avoiding the rain, cooked soup, baked banana bread, worked out, cleaned up my kid’s sleep-puke (sudden inexplicable sickness! oh boy! at least he didn’t really wake up as we changed him and his sheets), and watched a little TV.
It was tough to resist the urge to read King’s 11/22/63 all day. It’s fun, and has one of the most hilarious and sensible answers to concerns about a certain time travel paradox that I’ve ever read. Good food, good books, good work — what more could one want? (Oh, yeah — a kid who doesn’t get sick and throw up. That’d be nice. Poor boy. At least he felt fine and was cheerful all day.)
NaNo Update: Wrote 2,500 words or so yesterday — a bit on my lunch break, the rest in the evening. A creepy pathologist has given his creepy opinion on a creepy medical mystery, and the subject of necromancy has been broached. Today I get to write someone running for her life and kicking robots. (Kicking robots is a futile thing; it hurts your foot, and doesn’t much bother the robot.)
Last night I started reading King’s 11/22/63, and it’s totally engaging so far. I’m not particularly interested in the Kennedy assassination, but that doesn’t matter; it’s weird time travel! And more importantly, it’s Stephen King. I’m pretty much a wholly non-critical reader when it comes to King, maybe because I started reading him so young. I just fall into his books completely and bob happily along. Even his books that didn’t make a huge impression on me, that I wouldn’t bother to re-read (Dolores Claiborne, Gerald’s Game) are entirely engrossing on my first time through. I could easily do nothing else today but read that book… except my to-do list involves going grocery shopping, going to the library, cleaning house, playing with my kid, writing more, etc. etc. etc.
I have deemed things autumnal enough to make my famous apple onion parsnip carrot soup. Here is the “recipe” (keeping in mind that, with soups, I just kinda put stuff in until it tastes good):
Brown a pound or so of sliced sweet italian sausage in olive oil. Add chopped peeled carrots, peeled apples, onion, and parsnips, and saute until the onions are translucent. Add maybe half a dark beer and a generous splash of apple cider vinegar. Bring to a boil and let some of the liquid evaporate. Add chicken or veggie broth until it’s as soupy as you like. Simmer a while. Season with rosemary. Serve with crusty bread or even sandwiches of sharp cheddar cheese. (How many of each veggie and what kind of apple to use is a matter of personal taste — I’d do maybe two carrots, a couple parsnips, a couple of Granny Smith apples, one good-sized onion.)
NaNo Update: I wrote about 1650 words on my Secret Forbidden Mystery Project of Mystery (hereafter “SFMPM”) last night, bringing my total word count to 11,500ish out of an estimated 90-100K total. Hey, it’s a tenth of a book! (Of course, it was pretty much a tenth of a book already.) It took me a few hours to generate those words, because I was reading through the existing chapters, making tweaks, cutting bits and adding bits, expanding scenes, and etc. Nothing truly new was written, but many things were clarified, and I started doing foreshadowing for some of the last-third reveals I have in mind. Given that I first wrote the proposal for this book in 2009 (it took a while to sell), I couldn’t just dive right in to writing new scenes — I needed to immerse myself in the voice of the book again, and revising the first 10K was a good way to go about it. I’m going to try to set aside an hour a day, every day, to work on this book. If I can do that, the deadline may not kill me.
On an unrelated note, my poem “Lion Heart” is up at Apex magazine, in the first issue under the editorship of Lynne M. Thomas, who asked me to write a poem. (The poem is kind of super depressing, though there’s a gleam of hope too, I think. Ever since I had a kid, the thought of losing a child has shot to the top of my nightmare list, and for poetry, well — sometimes you have to consider your nightmares.) It’s a great issue overall. If you like what you read, support the magazine by subscribing and so on.
