snurfle

Seen in applegnat's journal:
Romance novel covers "reimagined".

I think a lot of us can agree that a large number of romance novel covers are pretty silly and are just asking to be ridiculed. So that's exactly what I did. I bought a few of them at the used book store and got to work on them. The artwork almost writes its own jokes.

Ho-hum. Am mentally preparing myself: Four 8.25-hour days in a row of unrelieved boredom in Club Nobody Ever Comes In Here And Buys A Drink, Let Alone Leaves A Tip. I hope I can get some serious whipping-into-shape-of-the-Vikingsnovel done. But as I've said, that's nigh-impossible to do on the Newton: I need to take a big-picture view when editing, and the Newton makes that entirely impossible. So I can rewrite dribs and drabs, with the paper copy in front of me if I'm lucky enough to have one, but i really need to do a big-picture overhaul of the first 8 chapters and I don't think it'll work.
But, we'll try. Today's the day I see if it's feasible.
At least I'll try to redo Ch. 8, to make the first beta draft. I've been able to do that at work. I can't do the second beta, but maybe the first. That's a simpler rewrite and I don't need access to quite so much material. (Although, in Ch. 8's case, it seems I do, as i was utterly unable to get it finished last week due to not knowing what I'd already written.)
Failing that, I'm bringing Lost Tales and its sequel with me to work, and I'll read those instead and get nothing done.

In short, this week is going to be a big fat fucking waste of my fucking time.

I mean, we'll see. Yes. That's what I meant to say. I'm being fucking optimistic here, right? Yeah. Fuck. I'm never going to finish this fucking novel.
Er, I mean... Whatever.

hmph

Yeah, this is pathetic: I find myself alive with desire to rewrite the Fall of Gondolin as a novel-style narrative, from someone's point of view, in reasonable language. But of course my knowledge of Gondolin is restricted to having skimmed the bit about Tuor in Unfinished Tales and having puzzled through the Fall in LT2, and is heavily, heavily colored by tehta's brilliant but unconventional tales set there.
And, I have other stuff to do.
( in which I wibble on a bit and probably arouse ire but don't really mean to insult poor JRRT )

I won't write it, more likely than not, but I'll sigh over it a bit.

In other news, did this week's math as far as income goes and am just laughing. Do you want to see a chart of the tips I get in a week, and how much the amount varies week to week? It's funny. And yet, agonizing.



Those are the cash tips. The dollar amount isn't as important as the distance between the high ones and the low ones. (Blue is just the airport; red is total; and at the end, they're the same, because the last two are after localbar fired me.) After another week it's going to be even more amusing, because my cash tips are gonna be down at the first week's level.

But how can I set a budget, when I have that crap to deal with? Urgh. At least LocalBar was reasonably consistent-- I could count on a figure within 15% either way, from them. The Airport is far more likely to drastically cut or expand my hours, and the amount one makes there can vary so widely dependent on flight delays and which bar you get sent to, it's driving me nuts.
Eh well. Next week's schedule should be reasonably normal, so I'll use that and try to find a second job. Pain in my ass.

Bah

Got some work done on Ch. 8 and then hit a block. Hm, don't have the materials necessary to complete this chapter with me, will have to sit here for the next six hours and I have nothing to do...
I'll hopefully finish it up before I sleep, or tomorrow morning before work. *grumble*

So i read Lost Tales 2 some more and it's not bad, and I can see where he was going with the mannered writing style, and parts of it are really lovely, yes yes. And yes, y'all are right, it would be hard to tell from someone's POV and have it be unsentimental enough to be worth reading. (I did make a small effort at work. Did a very brief section from Glorfindel's POV. But I hardly know the characters.)
If I were going to make a serious attempt I'd probably go with Egalmoth. He's present for most of the significant events, he witnesses most of the things worth describing, and he survives, though injured, the flight. (He dies later, protecting Elwing.)

So, while I was bored, here's a brief bit of Glorfindel POV Fall of Gondolin. It cuts off abruptly because I realized it was 7:45 and I had to take down the coffee pots and the bar and the snacks and do some dishes before I could go home. It's just a rough draft and I doubt I'll work on it anymore. I did try to proofread it, to catch any obvious errors, but I didn't have much time to spend. So there it is, for what it's worth. Do keep in mind I've no idea what I'm talking about and this has probably been done, and far better, and i have never bothered to go look it up.

( 1290 words )

So yeah, I was a bit bored in the Club.
I was actually trying not to be overly sentimental.
And other than that, I made $13. I leave it up to you whether my time was better spent at the drink-pouring or the fanfic-writing.