Got my 500 words. I'm actually having a lot of fun with it these days. The writing is a whole lot crappier than in Part I, but what the hell. It's a-gittin' writ.
Saturday, May 19, 2012
5/19
I worked the nursery school yard sale today while The Husband took the The Son an hour south to a model rocket launch. It was more complicated than it sounds, with a lot of shuffling of schedules and vehicles so The Son could bring his cardboard arcade games to the yard sale before leaving for rocket and ice cream fun.
Friday, May 18, 2012
5/18
500 words done.
No meta-cleaning today, though. The Son had a playdate, I had to make cookies for the nursery school yard sale tomorrow, and then tonight I went and helped organize and price items for the sale.
No meta-cleaning today, though. The Son had a playdate, I had to make cookies for the nursery school yard sale tomorrow, and then tonight I went and helped organize and price items for the sale.
Thursday, May 17, 2012
My Day o' Virtue
Got my 500 words. Cleaned for an hour. Wrote a report for work. And my car was in the shop all day, so I walked a ton. I'm feeling very virtuous.
The action has shifted from far-future post-plague New England to a small island in the vicinity of Indonesia. A whole crop of wild-ass minor characters are about to burst on the scene. But for now, Willow is having her first face-to-face encounter with Ruyad (a.k.a. Antagonist #2) in an open-air rotunda on a jungle night, and wondering what the heck that oil lamp is all about.
Wednesday, May 16, 2012
5/16 Post
I had an attack of the I-don't-wannas today, and sadly squandered my daytime writing time on such vital tasks as watching trailers for Duplass brothers movies and finally looking up "mumblecore" on Wikipedia. Now if I meet any indie-film lovin' hipsters in this country burg, I'll be set.
Got the 500 words, though.
And I meta-cleaned for an hour. Two rooms in reasonable shape, and two boxes of outgrown toys brought to the nursery school.
Got the 500 words, though.
And I meta-cleaned for an hour. Two rooms in reasonable shape, and two boxes of outgrown toys brought to the nursery school.
Tuesday, May 15, 2012
Spring Cleaning
Got my 500 words today. I'm ~32,000 for the draft so far, which is about a third done. My SAT kids are dropping off now (most of them took the test two weeks ago), so I'll have a nice long stretch to work tomorrow. After I get my daily words, I'm going to try to do some scene sheets for upcoming scenes, and maybe work on another The Fire in Fiction exercise.
I also meta-cleaned for another hour today. By "meta-clean" I mean sorting, discarding, rethinking organizational systems, restoring function to chaotic areas of the house. I am the first to admit that I am neither a skilled nor tenacious housekeeper, and I am also the first to complain that the other two people who live in the house with me contribute disgracefully little to the Avoiding Actual Squalor cause. I give myself a B+ on keeping up with what I refer to as "subsistence-level housework": dishes, laundry, and grocery shopping. And I can whip the whole house into presentable shape in one long, miserable day if I have to. But underneath the achievable surface clean lurks a deeper, more profound mess: closets you fear to open, a junk room that could be featured on an episode of Hoarders, drawers in the grip of an identity crisis.
The root of the problem is that a good 15% of the stuff in our house has no designated place, and we've kind of run out of places to put more furniture to hold more stuff. We're also bad about putting stuff that does have a place back in that place once we're done with it, and bad about throwing stuff away once it transitions to crap.
We're all to blame: me with my stacks of books that won't fit on my groaning shelves, The Husband with his 50 t-shirts that he wears at a rate of 2 per week, and The Son with his art supplies and projects slowly taking over the planet. Even The Sibling, who used to live here lo these many years ago, has a hand in it: he left behind half-dozen archaic computers when he moved out, which now take up like a quarter of the junk room and can't just be hauled to the dump.
Thus, the meta-clean. I'm still doing the subsistence-level stuff, but I'm also committed to spending an hour a day meta-cleaning this place until it isn't such a sty. The Son's school is having a fundraising yard sale this weekend, and I'm unloading a metric buttload of toys he's outgrown. And I'm planning to bring the old computers to Best Buy, and the less-loved books to the used book store. Other than that, I'm trying to be methodical, attacking one room at a time until it makes sense.
And to work this post back to being about writing: I started in the guest room, which doubles as my office (if a cat-clawed wing-back chair, a footstool, and a storage container of books and notebooks can be called an office), and I feel like I can think again in that room, now that it's not a sea of books and papers and stray Legos and random markers and kid art and are those underpants? When did The Son leave his underpants in the guest room? Now it's just boring gray wall-to-wall, and my soul is soothed.
I also meta-cleaned for another hour today. By "meta-clean" I mean sorting, discarding, rethinking organizational systems, restoring function to chaotic areas of the house. I am the first to admit that I am neither a skilled nor tenacious housekeeper, and I am also the first to complain that the other two people who live in the house with me contribute disgracefully little to the Avoiding Actual Squalor cause. I give myself a B+ on keeping up with what I refer to as "subsistence-level housework": dishes, laundry, and grocery shopping. And I can whip the whole house into presentable shape in one long, miserable day if I have to. But underneath the achievable surface clean lurks a deeper, more profound mess: closets you fear to open, a junk room that could be featured on an episode of Hoarders, drawers in the grip of an identity crisis.
The root of the problem is that a good 15% of the stuff in our house has no designated place, and we've kind of run out of places to put more furniture to hold more stuff. We're also bad about putting stuff that does have a place back in that place once we're done with it, and bad about throwing stuff away once it transitions to crap.
We're all to blame: me with my stacks of books that won't fit on my groaning shelves, The Husband with his 50 t-shirts that he wears at a rate of 2 per week, and The Son with his art supplies and projects slowly taking over the planet. Even The Sibling, who used to live here lo these many years ago, has a hand in it: he left behind half-dozen archaic computers when he moved out, which now take up like a quarter of the junk room and can't just be hauled to the dump.
Thus, the meta-clean. I'm still doing the subsistence-level stuff, but I'm also committed to spending an hour a day meta-cleaning this place until it isn't such a sty. The Son's school is having a fundraising yard sale this weekend, and I'm unloading a metric buttload of toys he's outgrown. And I'm planning to bring the old computers to Best Buy, and the less-loved books to the used book store. Other than that, I'm trying to be methodical, attacking one room at a time until it makes sense.
And to work this post back to being about writing: I started in the guest room, which doubles as my office (if a cat-clawed wing-back chair, a footstool, and a storage container of books and notebooks can be called an office), and I feel like I can think again in that room, now that it's not a sea of books and papers and stray Legos and random markers and kid art and are those underpants? When did The Son leave his underpants in the guest room? Now it's just boring gray wall-to-wall, and my soul is soothed.
Monday, May 14, 2012
5/14 Report
Goals met!
*500 words added to TOB
*finished phase outline for Part II
*completed one TFiF exercise
*cleaned my house for one hour
Now I have another hour in the library study room. I'm going to fiddle with the phase outline a bit, and then dive into the book I'm taking out (blithely ignoring the SIX books I have in-progress at home). Sweet!
*500 words added to TOB
*finished phase outline for Part II
*completed one TFiF exercise
*cleaned my house for one hour
Now I have another hour in the library study room. I'm going to fiddle with the phase outline a bit, and then dive into the book I'm taking out (blithely ignoring the SIX books I have in-progress at home). Sweet!
Sunday, May 13, 2012
In Praise of Tardy Students
Happy Mother's Day to all the USians! I got a lovely necklace and took The Son to a birthday party. The Parent is in Italy, so I didn't get a chance to wish her a happy day.
I didn't get much downtime today (so, no writing time), but fortunately* my evening tutoring kid was wicked late to our session and I busted out my 500 words while waiting for him. I'm still waiting now, actually.
Tomorrow I should have a long writing day. The Son has school in the morning, and it's supposed to rain so I'll probably leave him there for lunch (we usually go to the playground with school friends if it's nice weather). Then my mother-in-law is taking him in the afternoon so I can tutor... supposedly. One of my Monday kids just finished up and the other can't meet tomorrow, so I actually have 2 hours reserved in one of the private study rooms in the library, and no students! I plan to make the most of those 2 hours.
So, the plan:
Drop The Son at school, return home and start work by 9:00.
Get my 500 words.
Then, spend an hour cleaning the house. I've been patient, but it doesn't look like the house sprites are coming to clean it for me.
Then, work on the phase outline for Part II with whatever time remains until I have to pick up The Son.
Pick up The Son, grocery shopping, home until MIL comes for him.
Hit library. See if I can finish phase outline. If I do, or if I hit a wall with it, work on TFiF exercise.
Squee! I'll let you know how it goes.
*fortunately for me, not him. He has a five-page research paper due tomorrow and is all kinds of screwed.
I didn't get much downtime today (so, no writing time), but fortunately* my evening tutoring kid was wicked late to our session and I busted out my 500 words while waiting for him. I'm still waiting now, actually.
Tomorrow I should have a long writing day. The Son has school in the morning, and it's supposed to rain so I'll probably leave him there for lunch (we usually go to the playground with school friends if it's nice weather). Then my mother-in-law is taking him in the afternoon so I can tutor... supposedly. One of my Monday kids just finished up and the other can't meet tomorrow, so I actually have 2 hours reserved in one of the private study rooms in the library, and no students! I plan to make the most of those 2 hours.
So, the plan:
Drop The Son at school, return home and start work by 9:00.
Get my 500 words.
Then, spend an hour cleaning the house. I've been patient, but it doesn't look like the house sprites are coming to clean it for me.
Then, work on the phase outline for Part II with whatever time remains until I have to pick up The Son.
Pick up The Son, grocery shopping, home until MIL comes for him.
Hit library. See if I can finish phase outline. If I do, or if I hit a wall with it, work on TFiF exercise.
Squee! I'll let you know how it goes.
*fortunately for me, not him. He has a five-page research paper due tomorrow and is all kinds of screwed.
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