All I can do is fly away.

September 19, 2011 Progress Notes:

Light (bad working title)

Words today: 275.
Words total: 1350. No, it doesn't match. I frogged a couple paragraphs.
Reason for stopping: This is what happens when you stay up late watching all-night deputations to Council's Executive Committee. Such are the wages of municipal nerdery.

Darling du Jour: Three blackened dots along the inside of her left forearm, where she'd hugged a century-old girder and the massive iron rivets pressed hard into her skin.

Mean Things: The kinds of bruises that are going to make even strangers want to ask who's been hitting you. Sleeping 48 hours straight and not knowing where those two days went.
Research Roundup: Construction of 1920s buildings; how dark bruises on your neck actually get.

Books in progress: Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science-Fictional Universe.

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I am trying this in present tense. Nothing seems to be objecting so far.

The fun volunteer gig of Sunday was indeed fun: I spent the afternoon alternately manning the Not Far From the Tree info desk and helping wash, chop, grind, and press apples into cider at City Cider, at the Spadina Museum. Let me tell you, working on a demo of cider-pressing under a big blue sky and apple trees, with a nice crisp breeze and music, chatting with the other volunteers all afternoon? That is not work in the slightest. That is hanging out and playing with a cider press.

Also we got to drink some of the leftovers. The benefits cannot be overstated.

Today was rainy and crappy from dawn to midnight, so today I slept in, stayed in, and puttered around the house. Potato salad and honey walnut cake got made. Apple rings will come out of the dehydrator in the morning. Ideomancer duties were done. Three (3) author interviews/guest posts were written up and dispatched, and some receipts filed, and most of my inbox cleared. And then I got sucked into watching Council and there went the rest of the evening, but it was still and all a reasonably productive day considering I never got out of my pajamas.

Tomorrow there must be out: there is some extra yarn to exchange, and a new bedside lamp to buy, and other little things. Vacation continues to be more productive and less stressful than dayjobbing. There's a moral in that, I suppose.

To bed.

Circling the edge of the neverending.

September 20, 2011 Progress Notes:

Light (bad working title)

Words today: 450.
Words total: 1800.
Reason for stopping: Hit a stop. And before midnight, for once.

Darling du Jour: The quiet seeped out of the walls.

Mean Things: Waking up to some unexpected complications. No, even I didn't expect them.
Research Roundup: Sunrise times for late September.

Books in progress: Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science-Fictional Universe.

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Odd process things tonight: For the fourth time in four days, I am rewriting this same little scene, changing tense (we're back to past) or moving bits around or trying to start it from different places. Tonight I have it disassembled on the floor, cutting and pasting bits of paragraphs here and there, moving them like puzzle pieces, to try to make a picture that's the same picture -- two days later, girl gets up, notes bruising, and goes to Kensington Market -- but new. Somehow. There's a trail of sentences and images, the litter of previous versions, tailing down pages at the end of the file.

I think I am panning for narrative voice. And the leading tendril of an early conflict.

Revising, man. I'm telling you. It does things to your brain.

Otherwise.

Today, we did some small necessaries: mailed a few things, bought a new bedside lamp (the last one died the death last week), returned the extra yarn from the sweater to the yarn store for credit, and found some bubble bath, because it's September and chilly and there is no good reason for me to not have one drop of bubble bath in the whole house.

Things learned during this excursion include:

1) There are things Blue Banana* does not have for sale, notably lamps that aren't those ridiculous solid quartz lamps and/or bubble bath;
2) There is a vintage/antiques store in Kensington that, while not having lamps I wanted, has Atari games (!!!);
3) I won't even go east of Spadina anymore if it can be helped.

I also blew off what was probably a very good launch party for the Toronto Review of Books because I'd hit a good patch with the wordcount, and wrote all evening instead. Sometimes it's just like that.

Quick laundry, perhaps. And then bed. Lots to do tomorrow.

*Aka the Kensington Market Hippie Megamall.