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Smart brain. Of course Danilaw likes 20th century rock music. First of all, it's a worldbuilding point (which I will not spoiler.) But if he speaks archaic English, however haltingly, it also lets him talk to the people on the generation ship, now doesn't it?

1629 words on Grail today--just over quota, but as soon as batwrangler gets here, I have to go to New Jersey. This is my last commitment for a good long time, though, and I'm looking forward to crawling into my hole and pulling it closed after me until I get a couple of these damned books written and revised.

The more accomplished I become as a writer, and the more confident I am in my skills, the worse my drafts get. In a lot of ways, this thing I am writing looks very much like a really elaborate outline. It's full of bracket notes that say things like [show don't tell] and [make these characters' voices sound different]. I'm choosing to believe that this is because my subconscious has accepted that there will have to be heavy revisions once I figure out what the book is about, and the only way I have ever been able to figure out what the book is about is to work through it.

Sometimes I outline. Sometimes I don't. Sometimes I go back and outline stuff I've already written to see where it's going and get some distance on it. Sometimes I write out of order and sometimes I'm linear. Sometimes I scribble bits of scenes on scrap paper. There are no rules, only tactics that work or do not work.

Lately, my process seems to involve writing all sorts of sketchy things, bits and fragments and scribbles--and then later constructing a narrative out of them. This would terrify me, except I already did this on Chill and Bone & Jewel Creatures, and the final drafts of both books strike me as rather decent work.

Mean things: fears of the Other, barbarians, fretting by the phone.

16640 / 100000 words. 17% done!

The joys of working in a kennel, apart from only just finishing. It's now nearly twenty past eleven at night. But the real joy was finding a dog who had barfed everywhere until its kennel was one river of slime. Guess who barfed her cookies too?

You really wanted to know that didn't you?

Not that I was annoyed at the dog but...

The funny out of it all was a very concerned pitbull who just kept staring at me as if to say - what? What? It was one of those situations where you don't know where to turn. Where you *have* to clean up and you know what is going to happen so you try very hard not to make it happen. I can clean up poop to the yin yang, but barf? No. No, no, no!

I gave Kush a bucket earlier. I wish I'd kept it, but the silly boy has already wrecked it. To explain, Kush is the pitbull who just has to bring you something, anythign, and that includes the poop bucket, usually when it's full *sighs*. So I gave him an empty one and the joy on that dog's face was ridiculous. I've been training him not to flatten me every time I go into his kennel. he doesn't *mean* to he's just over exuberant and the idea of getting attention is just too much, so he goes balistic. Trying to persuade him that, look, you'll actually get more fusses if you stay the hell down is taking a great deal of my patience. But, I'm winning. he'd grab his cookies, leaping for them, now he'll sit. He would not sit and wait for his food but leap up and try to snatch it. Now he'll sit. It's hard for him, you can see every single muscle tensing, but he tries. Now I have to move that outside where he really goes crazy.

It's very hard for me and barb. Bosco and Kush are family and yet we both know they'd be better off in homes. But the big but is, what home? They need a firm but kind hand. They need people who totally understand pitbulls and who aren't afraid of them, who don't have kids, small dogs or cats. But mostly they need people to love them.

Ah well.

Now I've had a glass of wine and my stomach seems to have settled I had best go to bed.

Huh.

I just figured out what the deep thematic structure of Dust is about.

Well, that only took four years.

I feel much better now.

I have just discovered Junior Brown, thanks to Pandora. (I just wish it would stop trying to turn this into the All Allison Krause Channel. SRSLY) I mean, I kind of vaguely knew about his existence, but I didn't know I loved him with a deep and abiding passion. Dude.

I also wrote 2001 words on Grail this afternoon, which is pretty damned good for a girl who spent three and a half hours at the gym this morning.

I also did the stop-in-the-middle-of-a-sentence thing, because, well, I want to write the next bit I have to write, and that will encourage me to get a move on in the morning.

Tomorrow night, on the other hand, I will be here:

November 14, 2009
8:00 PM The Science Fiction Association of Bergen County, Saddle River Valley Cultural Center, 305 West Saddle River, Upper Saddle River, Bergen County, NJ

batwrangler will be my wingman, because she is awesome, and will drive down with me so I don't die on the way home.

13011 / 100000 words. 13% done!

Mean things today: second-guessing your ancestors, jihads and crusades, fear of alien invasion.

1006 words on grail, 783 on some nonfiction. Not too bad, all things considered.

Today's auctorial crisis: Aw damn. After two books, I'm finally going to have to describe this ship from the outside.

My Utopian society is starting to convince me. I wonder what's wrong with it? Other than that it requires lobotomizing the citizens, of course.

I am funnier when I'm punchy.  Also, I am funnier than I used to be. I learned this doing readings from BtMB lately. That book takes itself very seriously. It is Portentuous. Despite having been rewritten again and again and again.

This book is not portentuous. Perhaps I have relaxed a bit over the years.

Why I hang around with my writing group: a brief transcript from today's deathmarch support chat:

I am just kind of throwing words at the page tonight, honestly. Disjointed scene bits as they occur. I'm discovering that I like Danilaw a lot--he's got the ability to extemporize political speeches like a trained skald and he's also pretty funny. For the guy in charge of the lobotomy crowd.

11016 / 100000 words. 11% done!

Dear Cats:

While I appreciate that chasing each other around the house is an important part of your daily routine, please refrain from having bat-fights across the monkey's leg, or attempting to embroil her in your disputes. She does not have protective fur and needs all of her fingers to type with.

Also, the fingers with which she is typing are not toys.

Love,

Monkey

(P.S. I don't suppose either of you know how the sliding closet door managed to end up out of its tracks and fallen across the foot of the bed, do you?)

Criminal Minds 05x07, "The Performer," written by Holly Harold, directed by John Badham

That was a sort of sweet, touching, cute, lighearted episode of Criminal Minds. About vampirism. And Goth rock.

Where's my "somewhat incongruous" icon?


( He's got a gun. Keep moving.  )

Here, have a clip of Gavin Rossdale singing "Love Will Tear Us Apart" for Criminal Minds.

Climbed again. Five routes--three on the slab (two new and unrated, but 5.8 or so, I think--one had a tricky trick to it--and one 5.8 I've done before.) and that 5.8 from before. I also did a 5.6 that's reliably easy to practice my footwork on.

And now I have come home and my wrists are killing me, so I invented a drink.

I'm thinking of calling it a White Night, because it's a variant on the White Russian: cream, Chambord, and blueberry vodka.

Yes, I think I will make this again.

EDIT@08:16 UTC/GMT. Wow. That was ugly. I expected it to go for 30 minutes and have maybe 1 minute of broken connectivity. Instead it lasted over 4 hours and we had 10 minutes of downtime directly related to the load balancer upgrades and then another 5-10 minutes of downtime when our primary Pingback database server crashed and the secondary couldn't take over; which could have been indirectly caused by the network upgrade missing a self-VIP.

Anyways, we're up, we're working, the load balancers are barely breaking a sweat right now and I need some food and a shot of whiskey. I don't even *like* whiskey!!

Thanks mhwest and dnewhall for helping out!

---

On Saturday the 14th at 4AM UTC/GMT we will be upgrading the operating system of our network load balancers to a newer version, one that will allow us to use both CPUs! Nifty, because multiprocessing is nice.

Since we have 2 load balancers, the plan is to upgrade 1 at a time, and there really should be very little impact to our website. Hopefully you won't notice a thing and I'll get to go back to the hotel and watch some wonderful late night infomercials.

We've got a lot of exciting projects coming up for 2010 and we're hoping that we'll be able to deliver them all to you, that you will find it useful/cool/lovely and then you will use the site even more. Behind-the-scenes work like this will give us the capacity to handle the anticipated traffic, so expect a few more maintenance windows especially in the beginning of next year as we've got some neat ideas to improve performance around here! We had the recent 30-45 minute outage yesterday due to one of our logging databases filling up disk space -- not so great design coupled with my human error in handling the initial problem -- and it looks like we're going to finally have some resources to eliminate stuff like that. I can't wait!

As usual, I will be updating status.livejournal.org before and after, just in case you are not able to reach our main website during the work.

annnnnnnnnnnd I have now loafed the bread and set it to rise, roasted tomatillos and onions and chilis and garlic to make green chili to freeze, made and consumed ANOTHER pot of tea...

and written 1804 words, which brings me to the blessed number 10,010, or... a tenth of a book.

Yeah, I'm pretty proud of myself.

And Word knows "shibboleth." Just for the record.

Mean things: the kids a re fighting, Danilaw is trying to be a good leader, Godwin's Law.

10010 / 100000 words. 10% done!

And now I will listen to Morning Edition, bake that bread, eat something, and go climbing.

813 words. 981 to goal.

Thank you, to everyone who is or has served in the armed forces. I wish you well, and I wish for a day when you can all go home and raise cabbages.

“I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

“It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one and another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

“Armistice Day has become Veterans’ Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans’ dDy is not.

“So I will throw Veterans’ Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don’t want to throw away any sacred things.

“What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance.

“And all music is.”

             --Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut, 1973

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.


It is said that 40% of Canadians do not know why Remembrance Day is held on November 11th. Do you? Many think it commemerates the ending of World War 11. It doesn't, it's the ending of World War 1 - Armistice Day. The poppies come from the poem "In Flanders Field".

In the US they've changed the name to Veterans Day and in some ways that's wrong and in others it is right. I don't think anyone should ever forget the horrific battles of World War 1 and how much safer those mens' sacrifices made the world, but we also should never forget all the battles and sacrifices since.


Thank you to all service personnel everywhere for serving your country and making us all safer. And thanks to the families too.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.


{Photo courtesy of the canadian press. A poppy pinned to a rose at the tomb of the unknown soldier in Ottawa.}

So far today I have:

• taken the dog out and thrown his ball for him
• put away the massive tea shipment that arrived yesterday
• made tea
• drunk some of same
• slowly and mindfully eaten two thirds of a very good muffin (paying attention while eating good food: best meditation available!) (although I like to think other parts of me are enjoying the food even when the ego is checked out)
• washed a load of dishes
• kneaded two loaves of bread and put one in the freezer
• set the other one to rise

It's 7:35.

I am about to yoga, shower, dress, put my wrist braces on and write at least six pages.

I think I may need to sleep all afternoon, or the virtue around here just might rise to toxic levels. Or possibly that was all a catwax of epic proportions.

...but the cats are so shiny now. And if I hadn't made bread there would be nothing for supper!

Title: Writers' Block: The Great Myth
Summary: ... since I began writing, I've heard many different people exclaim "What shall I do? The horrid Overlord Writer's Block doth wound me greviously!"

Down the Rabbit Hole, Alice