Thud: Short Story, Shoggoths of the North

March 17, 2008 Progress Notes:

"Wedding Dress"

Words today: 550.
Words total: 1450.
Reason for stopping: Enough of a milestone number to justify stopping. This is hard.
Liquid Refreshment: Raspberry tea.
Munchies: Strawberries.

Darling du Jour: The practice of sati, wife-sacrifice, is one of the quieter oddities of the Peninsula's past. Of all of its customs, the trends and faiths and wayward ways that sweep over its shores like waves and rain and money, only wife-sacrifice is not discussed aloud in the historical salons. The ladies and philosophers grow quiet, fix one with a cold and steady stare, and tell the casual visitor that the very idea is undoubtedly barbarous.


Words Matthew Won't Admit to Knowing:
Mean Things: Being sent away. Drastic change in quality of life. Having a husband who won't do the courtesy of being awful, so you can't justify the fear of him you feel every night.
Research Roundup: beach pests, history of stoves. Apparently the stove as we know it -- a complete enclosure for fire -- wasn't realized until 1735.
Books in progress: Michelle West, The Broken Crown; textbooks.
The glamour: I did very little of consequence today. I have entirely run out of Go.

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I checked the creation date on this file tonight, while trying to find the last recorded metrics for it so I could see what I was up to. It's a few weeks over two years old. This means I'm having trouble making my style as comes naturally now mesh with my style as I set down the first 900 words or so in 2006, even if I think this story is finally, finally ready to go. I'd say cooked but...the thing that has happened in my head over the past six months or so is learning how to write a story without following it through the maze; learning to make active plot and theme and character decisions rather than having the backbrain do all the work. I drive, these days.

I think it makes for better fiction. But it makes writing that fiction that much harder, and that much slower.

That digging through old LJ posts prompted me to make a tag for the damn universe already. There is no good in keeping a working diary here if I do not organize the working diary so I can use it. I suspect from the drift of this story that I'll be writing in it some more, sometime. If I ever pick Rosemary, For Remembrance back up, and I suspect at some point I will, I could probably stand to make a Calendar Point tag too.

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In other news, the shoggoth that cvillette smuggled me through the mails arrived today, having only exploded half its contents into the nice mailing box. I have named the surviving portion of the expedition Lucinda, and it is now being fed hot brandy and healthful gruel flour and bottled water in a warm, dishcloth-covered medical facility in my kitchen. After taking the waters, a full recovery is expected.

Motivation Report

I found my Go.

It was in the dried mango slices.

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Dishes clean, produce and little granny cart for hauling groceries around bought, hair washed, and 500 words of essay on Eliot's Four Quartets to go before I can call it a night.

Remind me to never:

a) skip my vitamins
b) ingest caffeine
c) ingest foods high in white sugar
c.1) to the exception of real foods
c.2) for like a week
c.3) during the most important month of my semester
d) short myself on sleep
e) and all this on a few days where the ambient sunlight is really low

--ever again.

Idiot.

And to keep mango slices in the house.