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The snow is going to be with us a while, slowly morphing into a glassy rind of ice. Today has already seen its high of 30˚F and has begun sinking into the twenties, and the high tomorrow is forecast at a mere 26˚F. So, yeah. White out there for a while yet.
I'd planned to take the day off and leave the house for an expedition to photograph cemeteries in the snow. But, FedEx is supposed to deliver the new iPod today, even with our street looking more like the Beardmore Glacier, so here I stay. Maybe we'll take cemetery photos tomorrow.
Yesterday, I wrote 1,129 words on Chapter 4 of The Drowning Girl: A Memoir, which got me to manuscript page 174. I'd have written more, but I reached a point where Imp is typing a list of bad dreams she had between July 10th and July 17th (2010), and after describing the first two, I was afraid they were beginning to sound like me on autopilot. So, I stopped, to let it all percolate. Also, I'd already planned to divide the book into two halves— "The Drowning Girl" and "The Wolf Who Cried Girl" —but now I think I see that each section has to be six chapters long. Which means that when I finish 4, I'll be a third of the way to THE END.
If you haven't yet ordered a copy of Two Worlds and In Between, the platypus says this is a good day to do just that.
Thanks for all the comments the last two days. Keep them coming, if you can. They are mossy stones that help me cross the stream of days. There is something seriously wrong with that metaphor, but I don't have time right now to puzzle out what it might be.
When I was done writing yesterday, we bundled up and went out into the white world. The streetlights were coming on, the oyster day going to a slate twilight. We crossed the great stillness of Dexter Training Grounds. The wind whipped up clouds of snow from the ground, and a little fresh snow was still falling from the sky. At the southern end of the park, a small crowd was busy building persons of snow. In the shadow of the statue of Ebenezer Knight Dexter, a couple had constructed a modest sort of igloo-like shelter, and the ground outside was littered with goggles, a snowboard, hats, etc. We watched a very happy white dog running to and fro. The clouds had thinned, and overhead we could just make out the waxing quarter moon. There were lampposts straight out of Narnia. The air temp was in the low twenties, with the windchill at about 15˚F. I lay on my back in the snow, gazing up at the moon through the icy boughs of a fir tree. The cold hardly bothered me at all. It was dark by the time we headed back home.
In response to the thoughts I posted two days ago, regarding my constant struggle not to second guess my readers, a number of you have said you read my books precisely because I don't pander, and that helped, hearing that. Last night, this thought came to me and I wrote it down: Whores pander. Whores are paid to give you what you want. If I want someone to pander to me, I'll go to a whore, not an artist. Of course, obviously, not pandering limits my audience (though pandering absolutely doesn't guarantee more readers). It's not that I'm trying to make things hard on readers. It's not like I'm trying to do the opposite of whatever they might want (though, I have met writers with that particularly perverse streak of contrariness), it's just that I am my own ideal audience, and I write my books for me. And if other people like what I write, that's grand and wonderful and I can pay my rent, but I simply can't write for anyone but me. I've tried.
Last night, we watched Joel Schumacher's Falling Down (1993), which I'd not seen since the year it was released. It's aged very well, and is certainly one of Michael Douglas' finest moments. We also (FINALLY!) finished the Vashj'ir region in Cataclysm. No, it didn't really get any better. To make matters worse, it ends with a dungeon that you can't do unless you have five players, which means two players don't actually get to see the end of that part of the story (such as it is). This is an old gripe with WoW, their insistence of forced socialization and refusal to take into account those of us who don't have the opportunity and/or inclination to play in groups. Spooky and I never get to see endgame regions. Regardless, it's over and done with, and now we move on. No more Horde vs. the Sea Monkeys.
There are photos from yesterday evening, behind the cut. Mine are first, then Spooky's. Hers are much better, because the Lamictal makes my hands shake too much to take photos in low light without a tripod:
( 12 January, Part Two )
I'd planned to take the day off and leave the house for an expedition to photograph cemeteries in the snow. But, FedEx is supposed to deliver the new iPod today, even with our street looking more like the Beardmore Glacier, so here I stay. Maybe we'll take cemetery photos tomorrow.
Yesterday, I wrote 1,129 words on Chapter 4 of The Drowning Girl: A Memoir, which got me to manuscript page 174. I'd have written more, but I reached a point where Imp is typing a list of bad dreams she had between July 10th and July 17th (2010), and after describing the first two, I was afraid they were beginning to sound like me on autopilot. So, I stopped, to let it all percolate. Also, I'd already planned to divide the book into two halves— "The Drowning Girl" and "The Wolf Who Cried Girl" —but now I think I see that each section has to be six chapters long. Which means that when I finish 4, I'll be a third of the way to THE END.
If you haven't yet ordered a copy of Two Worlds and In Between, the platypus says this is a good day to do just that.
Thanks for all the comments the last two days. Keep them coming, if you can. They are mossy stones that help me cross the stream of days. There is something seriously wrong with that metaphor, but I don't have time right now to puzzle out what it might be.
When I was done writing yesterday, we bundled up and went out into the white world. The streetlights were coming on, the oyster day going to a slate twilight. We crossed the great stillness of Dexter Training Grounds. The wind whipped up clouds of snow from the ground, and a little fresh snow was still falling from the sky. At the southern end of the park, a small crowd was busy building persons of snow. In the shadow of the statue of Ebenezer Knight Dexter, a couple had constructed a modest sort of igloo-like shelter, and the ground outside was littered with goggles, a snowboard, hats, etc. We watched a very happy white dog running to and fro. The clouds had thinned, and overhead we could just make out the waxing quarter moon. There were lampposts straight out of Narnia. The air temp was in the low twenties, with the windchill at about 15˚F. I lay on my back in the snow, gazing up at the moon through the icy boughs of a fir tree. The cold hardly bothered me at all. It was dark by the time we headed back home.
In response to the thoughts I posted two days ago, regarding my constant struggle not to second guess my readers, a number of you have said you read my books precisely because I don't pander, and that helped, hearing that. Last night, this thought came to me and I wrote it down: Whores pander. Whores are paid to give you what you want. If I want someone to pander to me, I'll go to a whore, not an artist. Of course, obviously, not pandering limits my audience (though pandering absolutely doesn't guarantee more readers). It's not that I'm trying to make things hard on readers. It's not like I'm trying to do the opposite of whatever they might want (though, I have met writers with that particularly perverse streak of contrariness), it's just that I am my own ideal audience, and I write my books for me. And if other people like what I write, that's grand and wonderful and I can pay my rent, but I simply can't write for anyone but me. I've tried.
Last night, we watched Joel Schumacher's Falling Down (1993), which I'd not seen since the year it was released. It's aged very well, and is certainly one of Michael Douglas' finest moments. We also (FINALLY!) finished the Vashj'ir region in Cataclysm. No, it didn't really get any better. To make matters worse, it ends with a dungeon that you can't do unless you have five players, which means two players don't actually get to see the end of that part of the story (such as it is). This is an old gripe with WoW, their insistence of forced socialization and refusal to take into account those of us who don't have the opportunity and/or inclination to play in groups. Spooky and I never get to see endgame regions. Regardless, it's over and done with, and now we move on. No more Horde vs. the Sea Monkeys.
There are photos from yesterday evening, behind the cut. Mine are first, then Spooky's. Hers are much better, because the Lamictal makes my hands shake too much to take photos in low light without a tripod:
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