This and that

Time to start week two of the writing sprint. Wish me luck! Some things to clear up first:

Reading report for April: I read seven books, but four of them I'd read before. I read two more LeGuin novels (The Lathe of Heaven, which used the Tao idea of the uncovered block in a really cool way and also contained the word "odiose" (Backspacers will get why I'm geeked about that), and The Eye of Heron, which was a bummer). I had a few more to go but wanted to get away from Tao novels while I'm reaching the Tao part of my own novel. So I picked up The Ladies of Grace Adieu by Susanna Clarke. If you loved Dr. Strange and Mr. Norrell, definitely pick this one up. It's a collection of short stories, some connecting to the novel and some not, but all very good. (I'm totally jealous; I would kill to write something that was illustrated by Charles Vess). Then I decided to dig back in to Gibson. I read Gibson like I read Harry Potter; every time I want to read a new one I'm compelled to re-read all the prior novels first. Which is probably how I came to have four of them stacked up unread. So I read Neuromancer, Burning Chrome, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive, and I'm working on Virtual Light right now, which is the last one I've read previously.

I admit, I'm a heathen. While I'll admit that Neuromancer is his most important work, I actually like MLO and VL better. Kumiko and Chevette are deeper characters than Molly, I think is what does it for me. I particularly like Kumiko and how she wears her mother's expressions.

To be read stack now stands at 253. Yes, I'm moving backwards.

One other thing before I start my daily sprint. I've been nagging my husband for months and months to go back to our kung fu class and record some of the instructors going through the forms. I can only half remember them, and my favorite form, 18 point, I can't remember at all. He finally went and filmed one Sunday in December (when I was of course working), but he was using someone else's camera (it was nicer than ours).

I finally just this weekend got to see that tape (my husband lives in a different time stream then I do, I swear). I'm working out a way to get some of it on the PC so I can post some clips. I might have that worked out by Wednesday. In the mean time, here are some clips from You Tube to whet your appetite.

The first one is just Toph, the Earthbender who practices Kwong Sai Jook Lum, the style of kung fu I've done and hope to do again. The clip is long and very roughly edited (basically, someone took my favorite episode "The Blind Bandit" and cut it down to just the fight scenes). Toph's stance, the way she holds her hands, the way she walks her horse, are all spot-on for our style. And I love when she does the three point strike.

(Some would argue that I worry too much about the details when I write. I generally don't argue, but secretly I know how I geeked I am when someone goes through the effort to get something right. I would guess the number of people who watch AVATAR who can appreciate what they got right with Toph is in the 50s, maybe. Was it worth the effort? See, I just don't think the creators think of it that way. I don't think of it that way. It's a labor of love; it's all worth it).

At any rate, here's Toph:



This one doesn't have as much Toph in it, but it's set to "Kung Fu Fighting". There's another on their set to "Mortal Kombat", but this one won by a hair with me:

It's now the end of week one

So here's what I've accomplished in week one of my three week marathon:

Monday: 3495
Tueday: 2736
Wednesday: 1542
Thursday: 3353
Friday: 1158

Which is about 4000 words short of my goal for this week. Of course there's always the weekend; I might get time to write on the weekend (I think it's a tad more likely that the Swedish Bikini Team will stop by and bring me some really great beer).

Still, that's a nice chunk more than a usual week's worth of writing. In the normal flow of things, I average 1000 words a day. To give a sense of perspective to my non-writer friends, Stephen King in his book On Writing recommends writing 2000 words a day. Now Stephen King doesn't also have another fulltime job and homeschool two kids. But I also strongly suspect that Mr. King puts out more than 2000 words a day.

On a related note, Neil Gaiman recently posted some pictures on his blog of the notebook he's writing his current novel in. It's a gorgeous leather-bound Italian number and mine are just artist sketch books, but mostly I'm jealous because that bastard never crosses anything out!

So I thought I'd share my own pics. So far The Tao of Troth is in three notebooks, thusly:

The kirigami decorations are there because otherwise I have a hard time figuring out which is the front cover and which is the back. My usual inability to grasp simple things becomes even more hampered when I'm in write mode, so...

At any rate, the notebooks aren't all straight-up writing. I put a lot of things in there for reference. This page is a list of every member of the Norse village by family and age, which room in the house they sleep in, a table with all of the Norse dieties in Old Norse spellings, and a diagram of the Nine Worlds, just in case I need to know where Jotunheimr is in relation to Asgardhr.

I also have notes in there on Chinese alchemy. One of the characters from the last half of the novel is a Taoist alchemist. I very much doubt any of this will come up, since it's not really relevant to the plot, but it did help me understand the way he thinks:

This is an example of a page when the writing is going very well. Only a couple of cross-outs, a little "ooh, say this too!", and a Post-It clarifying something I thought was true when I was writing but saved the actual looking up for later (that the Spanish and Old Norse for "Greenland" is almost identical).

And here's a page from a more typical day. The "No. Dammit, no. No, not that either. Argh!" kind of day. (I don't remember this particular day, but statistically the little trailing off line marks the point when I was suddenly compelled to unload the dishwasher, or clean the bathroom, or start learning Swedish).

OK, it's time now to make dinner and then begin the endless drudgery which is the weekend.

Day 1 of my three week writing marathon

As mentioned previously, I'm trying to write the last half of my novel by June 30, with the plan that I'll tackle the majority of that in the next three weeks while we're on a break from homeschooling.

Now last week was a very good week for writing. I finished a short and submitted it to Marion Zimmer Bradley's Sword and Sorceress XXII (for which I got one of those nice rejections where it seems like the editor really is regretful that they can't buy it; they already have something else too similar. The story in question has already moved on to the next slush pile). That one I had been working on for a week before, had my critique group give it a good go-over, then rewrote it to fix the problems. You know, my usual writing thang. I was working on that in the afternoons during my writing time.

But I also had an idea for the latest Backspace contest that I really wanted to commit to paper. But that MZB story was taking up all my time. So I broke from my usual way of writing by staying up til 2 a.m. two nights running to write the whole thing out, then getting up early on Friday to type it all up, give it a rather rigorous edit (it was 800 words over the parameters, I had to lose an entire scene plus a lot of adjectives it probably didn't need in the first place).

I must say, I was very pleased with how it came out, considering. I might even consider changing up my writing habits (except I'm still feeling sleep lag; the problem with my schedule is that there is never any time to make up missed sleep. I have no "weekend" to sleep late, it's school or work every day of the week).

But the other thing about writing that short is that I was writing at a sprint, and I didn't edit it much before posting. Which makes me wonder how the novel would come out if I wrote it the same way.

So the plan is to write all the way to THE END in the next three weeks, a first draft commited to paper at a sprint. I'll wait until the end to put in the computer and start tweeking. Since I religiously outline, I know exactly what needs to happen and when, so this should be doable. Barring collapsing from exhaustion, of course.

So, Day 1 (yesterday): 3450 words. Pretty much all of chapter nine (although I did stick a few Post-Its on there, so that for draft 2 I remember to actually describe a few things which need describing). Now Monday is the one day of the week I never work (unless someone specifically calls me to ask me to), so I'm not expecting to hit that number every day. Still, not too shabby.

Since Quin was in Ohio I rewarded myself with a Jet Li movie: The Legend. I laughed my ass off, but I think the writing sprint had me a little punchy. Still, any movie where a man says "The man who can beat my wife can marry my daughter" is by definition my kind of movie (and when the man who beats his wife is actually the hero's mother in disguise...)

On a totally unrelated note, here's a little quiz I picked up from Written Wyrdd:

What Famous Leader Are You?
personality tests by similarminds.com

The same web site had another quiz which I took:

What Classic Movie Are You?
personality tests by similarminds.com

You know, it was a lot of the same questions, and I answered the same way. How I ended up being both Gandhi and Apocalypse Now I don't know. Didn't see that coming...

Energy Absorb Skill!

It's possible I've gone off the deep end with the wuxia. My boys are starting to think I'm nuts, but there's just something about watching a ton of these movies that makes you want to not only do kung fu, but shout out your moves when you do them. "Swinging sword!" "Shadowless kick!"

I think if I could say them in Chinese it'd be cooler, eh?

Novel research is so much fun (especially when you really bend the definition of "research").

Well, the real point of this post was to make a personal goal public. I intend to finish the WIP by June 30. Since I started last January, that would be 18 months from start to finish, much shorter than the 5 years the previous novel took to write (although in my defense, infants are horrible distractions with no sense of boundaries or personal time). I think it's doable because summer in general gives me more time to write, as the boys go to the park every night and stay until it's completely dark, and also because I'll have a three week chunk of no homeschooling, as it will be the boys' between grades break. The further along we go on this homeschooling adventure the less grades mean anything; the only thing that marks fourth grade different from third is the math book, everything else just continues along at its own pace. Still, since we school year-round (three weeks on and one week off every month - we're not nuts!), the three week vacation in May is always nice, especially since the two weeks we take off in December are usually desperately needed for cranky, too-much-overtime-at-work Mom.

Note for Blogspot readers: If you notice that the Zokutou word meter in the corner of the blog isn't moving, that doesn't mean I'm not writing like a madwoman. It just means I haven't copy-typed out of my notebooks. Having spent last week's writing time copy-typing short stories and a bit of the novel out of my notebooks (did you notice it bump up a little? it did!), all I can say is that's a lot like work! I suppose I shouldn't wait so long and then have to do it all at once (or maybe get a program that can read my handwriting off scanned notebook pages - that would be cool).

At any rate, wish me luck!

Here's a meme with pictures

I saw this on Andrew Wheeler's blog, and it was so cool I wanted to play. (You realize of course these blog posts which are all pictures are actually more work than the ones where I just type a bunch of stuff, right?).

Image meme: Plug your answers into Google Image Search and post the first image that comes up.

1. Your age on your next birthday:










2. Your favorite color:








3. Your middle name:
It's Ann. I'm not sure who she is; the world's most popular Ann, apparently.








4. The last meal you ate:
It was actually a bowl of oatmeal, not a plate of oatmeal cookies. It pays to be specific when Googling, I suppose. It was also a lot of hours ago; I'm doing this while I'm waiting for my very late lunch to come out of the oven.



5. Your bad habit:
I'll leave it up to you to decide what my bad habit is...





6. Your favorite fruit or vegetable:









7. Your favorite animal:
Why the suitcase? I don't know. It just came up first for "cat". But then again, cats universally do this, don't they? My cats fight over which one gets to sit in the suitcase.



8. The town you live in:
Minneapolis, MN of course.






9. The name of your pet or last pet:
OK, technically he's name for Spike Spiegel from Cowboy Bebop, but there is a reason why I've been known to call him my little blondie bear.




10. Your SO or best friend's nickname:
My husband is very anti-nickname. This is what came up for "Quin". Weird.







12. Your crush's name:
My first response was more "as if! Happily married, thank you!". Then I remembered that my habit of watching stacks of movies back to back which feature the same actor has led Quin to refer to these actors as my crushes. (I could probably word that better if I weren't so stinkin' hungry - three hours at the dentist!). In that vein, Jet Li is my current crush. As soon as my chicken's done it's going to be the start of a ONCE UPON A TIME IN CHINA marathon.


13. Your occupation:
That's even the same style of Dictaphone as I use! I actually prefer this picture, most of the runner-up images were insanely happy "workers" fake posing for the camera. She looks like she really does this for a living (although what she's doing with her hands there, I'm not sure. Waiting for the doctor to finish that cellphone call he answered without stopping the recording, I bet).

14. Your birth city:
Since this would be the same as #8 (and doesn't that just make it seem like I've never been anywhere!), I Googled just "Mineapolis" this time. I'm probably biased, but I think it's the prettiest skyline ever, especially when you're looking at it from across one of the lakes.



15. Your favorite song:
It's not everybody who's favorite songs are made into movies starring the Coreys. Actually, this movie isn't bad. The idea and the set-up are really quite cool, but the ending is a total hackjob. And the sequel? Complete waste of time. This is one of those movies I like to watch as a writer and try to figure out how to fix it.