Merry Christmas Eve Eve

I guess I should update. It's not like I haven't been around, I just haven't had anything to say. Mom is not doing well. She's on hospice now, which is end-of-life in-home care. Yesterday a friend of hers visited and told me to call if I ever needed someone to sit with Mom while I napped or ran errands or whatever. She said she could read while Mom slept. I didn't say so, but reading while Mom sleeps, or just sitting with her and watching a stupid TV show, is precious time for me. Those are the good times. The times when I wish I could call someone in to take over are ones that I would never delegate to anyone else: like half an hour ago when I wished Mom goodnight and turned out her lamp, and immediately heard her start vomiting up her evening meds. I had to jump into crisis mode--crisis mode is a daily occurrence now, which is why I'm always exhausted--and get her cleaned up, the bed stripped and remade with clean linens, her back in bed, and now I have two loads of laundry to do.

So. Well, maybe I shouldn't have posted tonight after all.

I hope everyone out there has a peaceful and non-vomit-filled holiday season.

Nearly finished

I'm nearing the end of Bloodhound, finally! It's just over 90,000 words at the moment and I'll probably be able to wrap it up at around 100k. That's considerably shorter than Bell-Men (the book it's a sequel to), which I've only managed to trim to 116k words (from 125k originally). I have no idea if having a sequel that's shorter than the first book is good or bad or doesn't matter. I'm not going to worry about it.

I'm glad to nearly be finished with Bloodhound, because I have a lot of other projects pending. I still need to finish the rewrite of Trickster Society, and I want to finish the first draft of Adventures in Zoology now that I know how to end it. I plan to do both in that order, and hopefully I'll be done with both before the end of summer.

Also, I just got my edits for The Taste of Magic and need to work on those. It would be nice to have about twenty more hours in every week.

Egg plots

I'm at the point with Bloodhound that the plot threads are starting to pull together. This is one of the most difficult parts of writing a draft for me. From here through the ending--which is difficult and emotionally draining--I'm going to be sweating it constantly.

I keep most of my plot ideas in my head, using the parts of my brain that aren't already taken up with song lyrics, phone numbers from my childhood, and what number the cable company has changed the History Channel to this time. This is why I can't do algebra; there's no brain-storage space left.

So at this point in the writing of any long project, keeping all the plot and subplot elements, character arcs, and physical description in mind as I write (and presumably strive for decent prose) feels like holding a very fragile raw egg. In my mouth. If I'm not constantly vigilant, I could crack the egg or even break it, or just choke on it, or just spit it out for a little while, that turns into a long while, that can easily turn into forever.

Pencils and Pens

I haven't been slacking from posting (much), I wanted to delay posting until I could say I typed THE END on the last page of The Trickster Society, which is back to its original title. And I have! Only I'm not done! I skipped ahead and wrote the very short last chapter since I knew precisely what I wanted in the denoument, and now I have to go back and write the big fight at the end. I'm partway into that, but I think it's time for bed.

But the real reason I posted is because I'm thinking about pens and pencils. I just read this over at Boing Boing about a revived famous old pencil: http://www.boingboing.net/2010/08/27/first-impression-of.html --I read the comments too, because it meant I could avoid writing for a few extra minutes--and I kept nodding my head or frowning.

I write a lot longhand, almost always in pen, so I'm very picky about the pens I use. I prefer the V7 Pilot Precise pens, although they're hard to find so I usually get the V5. Recently I bought a Bic 537R because it had a .7 tip, but while I like it, its ink is so dark that it soaks through the page of the cheap notebooks I use.

As for pencils, I've paid more attention to them than I ever have since I started working as a test proctor. You'd think all #2 or HB pencils are about the same, but oh lordie they are not. Last time we ordered supplies, we ended up with a lot of cheapass Office Depot pencils. They suck, OMG they suck. Half of them have the leads in so crooked it's impossible to use them, and the erasers pop out of the ferule on the other half. Some of the best pencils, oddly enough, are the ones with glitzy, elaborate decorations on them.

You know what I hate? Cheap mechanical pencils. They're crap. I'd rather use an Office Depot pencil. We have hundreds of cheap mech pencils in the testing center at work that people have abandoned. No one wants them. The lead snaps off all the time, they're flimsy, their erasers are tiny and not very good (and pop out and get lost), and they often just stop working so that you can't advance the lead or keep it in place once it's advanced. We just throw them away. Bad for the environment, bad for the test-taker, and a waste of money.

My gawd, I'm ranting about mechanical pencils. Someone needs to put me out of my misery.

Empty-headed as usual

I'm stuck on The Trickster Society, or as its shiny new title is, Shadow Crossing (100% more urban fantasy in that title! 100% less fun!). I have no clue how to tie everything up with a proper whizbang ending. I'm around 77k words in and have maybe 2k more that I can write without having to make a decision on the plot.

I tried outlining the ending last night, but I kept getting bogged down because, yes, it's hard to outline a big mental blank spot. I think the main problem is that this book's set in the real world, so I keep trying to apply real-world solutions to the book's plot issues. Why yes, I could get the bad guys arrested...but wouldn't that be lame? My main character has spent half the book training to be a bodyguard. I think she needs to kick someone's ass before the end of the book.

Exhausted. Miserable. Want to finish.

I wrote 7,500 words yesterday. Despite a miserable night being sick after a bad frozen pizza, I was up this morning writing again. I am almost done with this book. I'm about to crash right into the big final confrontation. And work is interfering! I just got home from work, and tomorrow is my big ten-hour day.

It's bad, because while I am typically a rather emotionally volatile person anyway, when I'm in the throes of a difficult scene or the end of a book, I'm much worse. And this week I don't even get my usual Thursday off. And everything managed to go wrong today, from minor irritations like running out of a particular handout, to major ones like the incorrect installation of a testing program I was supposed to use tonight that could not be fixed, so that tomorrow I have to call and reschedule ten people who were supposed to test tonight. And oh, were they happy.

Last night I picked up Moon Called by Patricia Briggs out of my To Be Read pile, because it was the thinnest book in the stack and I needed something to occupy me in between me getting intimate with Mr. Toilet from up close (TMI, I know. Sorry. Hope you weren't snacking). Not only is it darkish urban fantasy with werewolves, but Patricia Briggs is on the bottom of the "I want to read this" stack because I read her Dragon Bones book a few years ago and thought it was crud. But you know what? I'm enjoying Moon Called very much, which just goes to show that one should always revisit authors one dislikes from time to time.