Productive day!
We got the branches from last month’s nor’easter out to the curb for the town to pick up, *and* cleared the leaves from the front yard. 
Also called up NFCU to start inquiring into whether we can refinance our mortgage to a lower interest rate.
*feeling productive*
Routine
Routine is the only way I can actually manage being reliable. I’m too easily distracted to remember appointments without writing them down, or remembering to post when I’m taking a few days off from writing in the morning.
Of course, yesterday I got up at 6, showered, and went back to bed until 7, so there was no time to post in the morning. (Mainly because I stayed up late to finish reading The Alloy of Law, by Brandon Sanderson. Excellent book, by the way!)
I didn’t even think of posting at lunch, and after work was yoga, which left me too worn out to do more than eat supper and then play Sudoku on easy level until I had digested enough to go to bed without making myself sick…
Getting up early really is the key for me to getting other stuff done. And sticking to a routine is the easiest way for me to be reliable. Posting, writing, eating, working, even making sure I get enough sleep – everything can be thrown off-kilter by a single change to my routine. (In this case, taking a break from writing to read new books… and staying up late to finish one, which made me sleep late, etc.)
Does that mean I’m going to go straight back to getting up at 5 and writing every morning? Nope! I’ve got at least one more book to read before I settle down to another period of reliability. 
Eee!
The first trailer is up for the The Hunger Games movie!
Ohhh, it looks good so far! Makes me want to read the books over again already.
Happy Birthday!
Happy Birthday to Brian!
In honor of my wonderful, dearest love, here are a couple of fun links.
New Pictures by Tolkien Published
I wonder if any of the local bookstores have this in stock – after all, Brian hasn’t picked any birthday presents yet!
And, because he loves bicycles and biking:
I love you Brian!
No writing yet today…
Sleep trumped it. Hopefully I’ll get some in tonight, though.
Planning ahead…
I think I’m going to try to finish my Spring novel rewrite by the first of November. It’s an ambitious but realistically doable goal, based on the number of scenes I think I have left, and it would set me up perfectly to write something new for NaNoWriMo.
Daily (?) Scintilla – You know what they are…
I walked through the market with Ryan, scanning their wares for the ingredients we had braved the portal to gather. Turning a corner, I flinched and looked away from a display of curiously lifelike – and disturbing – sculptures.
“Ugh… those things creep me out. What are they even supposed to be?” I turned away and walked down another aisle, hoping to find what we were looking for and get out fast.
Ryan shot me one of those looks his family are so good at, that convey a scornful “are you serious?” more clearly than words. “You *know* what they are,” he said.
Suddenly, I had the uncomfortable feeling that I did, or I had. I pushed away the feeling of nascent knowledge and picked up a basket to look more closely at the weave. “Never mind,” I said. “I don’t want to know.”
I really, really didn’t.
Winter Novel Completion Status: FAIL
For those who don’t know, I’ve been trying to write a novel a season since the end of last summer. The autumn novel went well, but the winter novel, not so much.
This is not, honestly, too surprising…
Nor is it too disappointing. Failures, after all, are chances to learn, and learning is what this challenge is all about – learning what process works for me, learning the nuts and bolts of writing a novel-length story, learning about what keeps me going and what stops me in my tracks.
I started the winter novel out with the goal of finding out what happens next after the events of the autumn novel. I think that set me up to approach it with much more thought and planning… which unfortunately doesn’t seem to coexist peacefully in my brain with the flow of storytelling. I wrote and wrote and wrote… and then threw out what I’d written and started again. What I’ve got now, with the novel due tomorrow, is about 3,000 words – the same length as most of my short stories. And I have a feeling I might throw all of that out too.
So… I’ll still be sending the files out to my novel support group, as promised, but I’m hoping they won’t bother to read the contents. :-p
Last night, I bought a new writing book, The 90-Day Novel: Unlock the story within, by Alan Watt
“Story is alchemy. It is through the struggle between our protagonist and his antagonists that he is transformed.”
Transformation. Definitely something that’s a part of my story, but that I had forgotten about in all my planning.
Anyway, for the spring, I’m going to try again, making use of the prompts in the book and trying to let go of planning and just write! Structure is something I seem to be better able to discover in something already written, than to impose on something yet to be written.
Wish me luck!
© 2010 Catherine Wechsler, used with permission.
Sugary goodness?
This post is mostly personal, but I’m hoping to bring it around to relating to fiction by the end too.
I am a sugar fanatic. One might even say I’m a sugar addict, especially when that sugar is combined with chocolate. mmm…
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