now no matter what i do can't get my heart to bend

Pfuh. Posted this in the wrong journal. Being a dork, I'll just edit it and keep it as a different post. Me = so thriftie! Wait, that's not thrift, that's just weird.


Dave pitched me an idea for a book he actually wants to co-write with me. Imagine this: A witty and gifted writer who entirely eclipses me in any attempt at humor. A man with an attention span and ability to focus on a project like you wouldn't believe. A man who can stare holes in binary code with the lasers that are his eyeballs. And a human being I adore above pretty much any other, and with whom I work well.
He does the funny, the outline, the plot twists, and the backend coding on the site where we experimentally publish it as a 50-cents-a-chapter serial.
I do the bulk of the writing.

That would be the awesomest project ever.

Now we just need a pen name.

Well, I'm going to finish this novel first, and he's going to, well, finish his Bachelor's degree. But maybe over Christmas. If I'm not working my ass off. Possibly even if I am. As long as I'm not writing for work, I can write at home. Provided I'm not too tired to have ideas. And in this case-- don't need 'em, he's got 'em all.

Anyhow, I'm excited about that. And tired of this. My pacing is off, and the damn thing's never going to be the right length. Scenes that should be exciting are flat; scenes that aren't exciting are too long.
And limmenel hates me. Just kidding-- wanted to see if anyone was paying attention.

Anyhow, today's excerpt:

In which Our Hero is a total nancy-boy, and Our Heroine literally saves herself, and not just for marriage.

this being the edited part, I removed the excerpt. Because that's how I am. I'll put in a cut somewhere else. The excerpt was pretty sweet. You're all missing out on it and on all kinds of other novelwritingy goodness by not being treigylgweith's friend. Actually the journal entries amuse me and the excerpts are sort of indifferent. but that's just the stage i'm at. But anyway, as I mention later in the post, you just totally missed out on reading the part where my heroine does something decidedly unpleasant with a knife when she decides that people need to stop with the chasing and with the holding sharp things to her neck and other associated bullshit. Oy,


So, on to the positives. It's 2:30 am and I'm not asleep, which is maybe positive but probably not. Also,

36,928 / 50,000 (73.0%)

Yes, I stopped with less than 100 words to go to 37,000. I only just noticed that.

( and now i'll cut the music, just to have a cut somewhere )

Mmmyep. Onea these days i'ma gonna figure out how this livejournal thing works, and post to the right journal sometime. i been doin this a lot.


OK, weird-- I put in an lj-cut, and it's just not there. No error, no nothing; it's just as if I never typed it in. I swear to God I know how to type that. I was trying to put the music behind a cut so as not to offend the anti-piracy folks, but the cut, after four edits, is just not there. Go fucking figure; I am too fried to have any fucking clue why on earth that would happen. Dude. And I was trying to save myself agony with all this.
Just went to the FAQ and copied and pasted their code to do an lj-cut, and it ain't showin' up. It's there, when I edit the entry, but when I view the entry? Not there.

Go fucking figure; I give up.

two unrelated thoughts

1) my mother, recently given a perfectly clean bill of health including a kidney ultrasound, is consistently experiencing a totally inexplicable terrible salty taste in her mouth, unrelated to anything she has eaten or drunk. she cannot imagine what it is. neither can any of her doctors.
but she doesn't have diabetes or kidney failure or high blood pressure or anything else at all. so i suppose that part's good. maybe i'll buy her some gum... i can't think of anything more helpful.


2) a friend of the family, one of the other moms in my mother's little group of friends when i was a kid, a woman who was over at our house all the time when i was little but whom i haven't seen in person in five or ten years or so, died a couple of days ago. her name was Maveret Daigle. she had bone marrow cancer and was doing well but took ill suddenly and just died the other night. i hadn't seen her in forever; i don't remember what she did for a living, i know her husband is the EMT who responded first when my sister Ann rolled the black jeep onto the Goodmans' lawn over at Pinewoods & Gutbrodt.
all i remember of Maveret is that she was the only person we knew who smoked. i also remember that she was the first person i ever heard utter the expression "colder than a witch's tit", in regards to the weather. she was nothing if not colorful.

but i was sorry to hear she had died. mom recently went to a lunch where all the moms of her contemporary group got together-- mrs. bayly, mrs. desorrento, mrs. buonnanno, mrs. hegarty, and mrs. daigle (sorry if i forgot anybody. maybe mrs. broderick was there too?)-- and remembered what it was like back when the kids were all underfoot and none of them had any money. i guess they were the melrose moms-- i think all of them lived in our little hamlet of melrose, or close to it. i'm not sure what made them into a group, in particular. except that they all had children between 1977 and 1987. to remember those times is to remember the baylys' 4th of july parties and the bi-directional parade down Ave. A (a central street in Melrose; there is no Avenue B) that always preceded it, to remember barefoot summers and best friends you didn't like very much but shared your whole life with and even took baths with, to remember being occasionally utterly bewildered by the exceedingly wicked things the moms said, and the delightedly awful laughter that followed. (i guess they joked about setting up a prostitution ring out of their houses to make money on the side. i mean, who would ever expect it? nobody!)

i was sorry to hear about maveret. i always loved her name. i wish her son had turned out better. but i didn't expect much else-- he taught me all the dirty words i knew until about high school. (she used to joke that she had contemplated tattooing the telephone number of the poison control center onto his forehead, but it wasn't really a joke. she just used magic marker. perhaps that's a joke instead, but i'm not telling.)

and now i remember-- it was at her house that i tripped and fell chin-first onto a chair when i was 2, and had to go to the hospital to get stitches. at the hospital they put a blue plastic cloth over my face so that i wouldn't see the doctor hurting me and become afraid of doctors, so i shrieked and shrieked because this blue thing was hurting me and i didn't know why, and they had taken away my stuffed animal du jour for no good reason at all (which traumatized my mother more than me). still, that damn blue thing, and sitting on maveret's knee as she looked at the cut, are probably among my earliest memories.

there was a couch in maveret's living room with a bearskin rug on it, that still had its head and claws. i used to pet it, and the hair was very coarse and cool. the house had no carpets and smelled of stale cigarette smoke. i could probably draw the layout for you. i think i was baby-sat there often when i was very small, but i don't remember the circumstances, only the layout of the house. and something involving legos and the piano bench. and the fact that it all needed a coat of paint or varnish, including the outside of the house, but it never got it.


i couldn't tell you why i'm not using capital letters in this post except for some of the proper names, but at some point i decided that's what i was going to do. i apologize; i've no real reason except for feeling a little bit flattened at the moment.

two of the moms from my mother's circle of friends are dead; two others of the moms have dead sons. mom is 52; most of the other moms are around 5 years of her age. mrs. bayly's son was 17 when he died, for no reason, god no reason at all-- that was awful and the whole county went into shock because everyone loves the baylys. i remember calling him john-john when he must've been about 4 (so me and tara were 7 or 8 i think) and was running around naked, blond, gleeful, curly-headed and hyperactive and hitting his sister tara with an aluminum baseball bat. mrs. broderick's son was 29, i think, and he also died for no reason to the shock of everyone-- but at least without violence, as he had lived. i remember him less well because he was much older but he taught my older sister to play the drums.

i remember an increasing number of people who are dead now. thank God none of them are my immediate family (and i frequently do). and death still perplexes me, because i don't entirely understand it. but the number of people i remember who are now dead is only going to increase. i suppose the only solution is to view it as a positive thing-- i will only know more people as i go on in life, and whether they are live or dead doesn't affect my ability to remember them.

this is meaningless, but...

I am currently on the first page of results if you sort all NaNo authors with wordcount by wordcount in descending order. :) I am ninth from the bottom. A number of those in front of me have obviously fictional wordcounts. (one claims 500,000.)

It means absolutely nothing. However. I am obscurely pleased because I am not cheating or exaggerating in the slightest, as treigylgweith can attest to: i have posted everything on there and ain't none of it fake. i wrote all of that, and I didn't write any of it ahead of time.

so, i am entirely nothing like cool, but can point to that as an accomplishment.

Does it mean I'm cut out to be a real author? No.
Does it mean I can get that novel published? Not necessarily.
Does it mean I'm any better than any of the 17,000-odd-authors signed up there? Nope.

But damn it, it definitely means I know how to not ever shut up. And if that's all I got going for me, I'll take it.


I'll also take... a nap. Now. Yes, I think now. Yes.

grumble

i hate it when, after going to sleep super-late, your body insists on waking up at the regular time even though you are groggy and feel ill.

and i hate it more when, having woken up at the regular time and begun to go about your business, your body insists on shutting down again, and so you spend an hour sleeping in a rather unexpected place in which you did not intend on sleeping.

(no subject)

I'm gonna do something un-kosher, and repeat a joke. Fictioneers, I'm sorry.

Stolen from this comic strip, a conversation with Dave via IM.

Me: My plot sucks!
Me: No, wait, it's awesome!
Me: ...
Me: Dammit, now it sucks again!
Dave: Maybe it just sucks really well.



But seriously, folks. Major plot revisions. HOWEVER, unlike LAST TIME, I only lose about 5k words by it, and being the noodge that I am, i'm not going to take them out of my wordcount, because I WROTE THEM DAMMIT. So they're staying in underneath the revisions.


edit: Shit, it's more like 8,000 words.

That's like 2 days' work.

*weeps*

But it's OK. This will be better. They were 2 days I wasn't thrilled about. Two days of very poor acting on the part of my main characters.
("Oh, it's you," he said. Duh.)

But still. 2 days.

The writing should be easier now, though. At least it's not like the 3-4 months I lost with the last novel. ("Sweet, none of this applies at all. I rule!"-- me, April, reading everything I'd written.)

but the grill is so delightful

dave went outside to light the grill (we keep our grill on the screened-in porch off the back of the house, in the winter). I, groggy, had fallen into a doze. My doze was shattered a few moments later by a shrill "HEY!" from Dave.
"What?" I asked, sitting straight up in horror.
He came running back inside.
"It snowed!!"



Yep, it snowed. There's snow all over the place, clinging on the car and the grass-- nearly an inch.

Did we witness a flake of it?

No. I'm busy on NaNoWriMo, and Dave's writing a paper on Savonarola.

But at least we noticed it was there before it melted.

(no subject)

I spellchecked my entire document. What fun.

Few spelling errors, many typos.

Have become spoiled by Word's "auto correct". I ought to turn it off to preserve my good typing habits. But, haven't.

After 75 pages, suddenly it has started automatically inserting a tab every time I put in a carriage return. This is annoying because I have already become accustomed to inserting the tab myself. So I now have to hit return, tab, and backspace to begin a new paragraph, unless I want all double-indented. Stupid helpfulness. But that sort of thing is at a minimum in this program, at least, and if it autocorrects something you didn't want autocorrected, you can ctrl+z it right back as it was. This hasn't always been possible in Word.

So there's my little Micro$oft for Mac Isn't Bad peptalk. (Apparently Word for Mac is way better than even the brand new Word for Windows. Snigger. Suckas!) [And do remember: Bill Gates is a major investor in Apple.]

45,609 / 50,000 (91.0%)

It's going much faster with the plot revisions.

But 8.5k of it is going to be gone the moment I begin editing. And that's a bummer.