Sillybean

Got the MRI on my neck. No word yet from the doctor, naturally. The neck is not too bad at the moment, but the insomnia and the migraines have been slapping me around for the last few days. You know you’re having a lousy week when PMS is a welcome relief.

I have design ideas [...]

Our vacation has snuck up on me. Sarah and I are driving to Houston tomorrow night and flying to Boston on Saturday, meeting up with the boys there. They’ll be in training all next week, so we’ll be on our own during the day. We have food and touristy recommendations, but if you know where [...]

Over in a nice discussion of the generation gap in SF on Tor.com, a commenter crunches numbers on the ages of Hugo winners and comes up with a pretty clear trend. Really fascinating, assuming you care about this sort of thing in the first place.

ETA: A handy graph, all color-coded and shit, via Tobias [...]

I have given up any pretense that I’m just jotting down enough notes to remember the new book when I’m ready to come back to it and will soon return to revising the old one. This book is a freight train running at full speed, and it will flatten me if I do not keep [...]

I am so very tired of this book, and so very excited about that other one I am not supposed to be writing.

The new first chapter is coming together in my head, though.

My husband, who does not read for fun, snatched The Watchmen from me when it arrived in the mail today and has been ensconced on the couch with it for the last two and a half hours. Guess I’ll be reading that when he gets done….

My goal for this weekend is to revise the first [...]

As usual, the characters are great, but I have failed to bring the conflict. They’re having a cocktail party in my head, looking at me over the rims of their glasses like, “What? We’re not supposed to like each other?”

Annoying, they are.

So, Bear’s new column is up at Subterranean. It’s about learning, and learning how to learn. This made me stop and think:

But there’s a corollary. If all you ever attempt is things you can’t do, the result is discouragement. And also, coming back to things you can do, going over them again and again–like playing [...]

The out-of-order problem is way worse in the second half, which I knew. I still love my subplot, and I think it’s less flawed than I thought it was. The main plot is more so, but… I think I can fix this.

I’ve been working on web stuff more often than not, so I’m going slowly through this, and I’m still on the first pass. Took the big pile o’ paper to the coffee shop writing group this morning, and I’m now up to page 250. I’m crossing out lots of stuff — scenelets that never went [...]

Halfway-plus through Sherwood Smith’s delightful Inda, I must pause and bitch: DAW, why O why did you not include the character list in the published book? Because, Christ on a crutch! In addition to the usual firstname-lastname thing, each school-age character gets two more names at the academy: an official name formed from the family [...]

I’ve figured out, more or less, what works and doesn’t work with the overall structure of the novel. The antagonist is barely there. The middle turning point is missing altogether, which I knew, but the first one’s pretty weak too, and the wrong secondary characters are in it. Stuff like that. I’ve also figured out [...]

I’m going in.

My sciatic nerve is angry again. I do not like it when it’s angry.

It’s the Week of Birthdays around here. Happy birthday (in order): Mike, Ryan, David, Lisa, Wendy (UPDATE YER BLOG, GIRL), and Sarah. You are all far too damn old, but it’s better than the alternative.

This week on Shadow Unit: the WTF BBQ, [...]

How very predictable.

New words: 684
Reason for stopping: 2 a.m.

Charliewords: 3,609 / 67,500 (5%)