(no subject)

I had forgotten how much I used to love the clarinet. I played it for years. I had very good tone and excellent by-ear faking-it ability, but sadly was never much good at reading music.
The CDs Z and I bought the other night were as follows:
( I am a weenie and Z is avant-garde )

And the most amusing purchase of the evening, which has taken some breaking-in but now that I'm sort of used to it is indeed brilliance in CD form:
R. L. Burnside's A Ass Pocket Of Whiskey, featuring an incoherent old bluesman plus the entire cast of the John Spencer Blues Explosion, all apparently drunk, in a series of live recordings from an afternoon in Missouri. Mostly I've no idea what Burnside's going on about, and John Spencer breaking in to shriek about how he got to boogie sheds little light on the matter, but you know, by the end of it, you sorta got the idea.

In other news, am attempting to get a running start at a final draft of the Vikings Novel. I think I could finish it relatively quickly. Then I could stick it on the shelf and say "it is done" and send it off to a couple people, see what they think-- and meanwhile, bolstered by having finished something, at least for now, I could perhaps tuck into one of the more ambitious abandoned projects. Or even a new one-- I am being ceaselessly tickled with ideas and it's rather wearying not to act on them at all. At the moment the newer ideas are distinctly science fictionish in the fantasy spectrum; I am resigning myself to the fact that I am not a historical novelist like Patrick O'Brian, despite how much I would love that and how much my family would adore it. I do not have a head for research or an eye for detail and no matter how I try, I simply cannot restrain myself from making stuff up. I despair of ever finishing the George Denison novel, because I simply can't find a good way to get myself to envision seventeenth-century New England's daily life and speech patterns. Maybe if I spent a summer working at Plymouth Plantation (it's almost right-- Georgie's story begins in Roxbury, MA in about 1630, and he was indeed a Puritan, if not a Pilgrim)... but short of that, I really don't know how to get that mindframe right.
Vikings Novel will be bad enough. I know I'm shamelessly making stuff up, and I don't know how to stop. I think after this I had better adhere to fantasy for a while.

Eric Hoeprich - Clarinet Concerto A Major, K. 622 - II. Adagio - Complete Mozart Wind Concerti: Volume 1 - Woodwind

hey, i did something today.

Sigh. It never feels like much. But I went through the thing, and wrote down changes I want to make, and evaluated how long it is, and what's written and what needs to be thrown out and started over.
Of Draft II, there are only a few changes to make-- I need to add a couple of sections, including in the very beginning, and I need to rewrite several points because the plot changed when I uncovered additional historical information. (I've mentioned I'm a shitty researcher.)
Of the latter half of the novel, which is still only my first draft, there are a surprising amount of chapters which will remain reusable. But of course, I have to toss out the whole ending. Eh well.
( a tally )