We’re almost out of January, and we’re finally getting a grasp on the book. We ended up slicing and dicing what we had, moving scenes around to fix the pacing.
Now we’re having to fix all the discrepancies for time and cause and effect. Bob got more than half way through it and started to scream and sent it to me, and I’m trying to get the rest lined up, but it’s a lot better, and we’ve got a much better grasp on the plot although we won’t know for sure until the first draft is done. I am still driving Bob nuts with that two-spaces-after-a-period thing, but he’s coping.
What did you work on this week?
Multiple projects continue! Quilting! Crocheting! Plus work that I’m actually getting paid to do, even if it isn’t as creatively fulfilling as my other stuff.
I’m trying to get my entries done for the Quilt Show we’re having in March. The deadline for that is the end of February. And since one of them is just a concept, I’ve got a lot of work to do!
In the meantime, I’m making a second stool cover, so that both of those can migrate from my house sometime this spring. Pictures when I’m done.
I got a tremendously focussed and critical friend to read my WIP, which was so amazingly helpful I owe her ALL THE DINNERS. She asked lots of proper questions about pacing and continuity, and pointed out things I forgot the reader didn’t already know, etc etc. She’s frankly terrifying in real life but she was absolutely spot on in everything she said. I feel like I’ve just left the dentist with a clean bill of health and some very specific advice on interdental brushes
“She’s frankly terrifying in real life but she was absolutely spot on in everything she said.”
Hahaha, I’m now totally convinced your friend is a client of mine…or her long lost twin.
I’m getting zero writing done between workmen, trying to do my taxes, and major issues at the Artisans’ Guild, the shop I co-founded and ran until about 10 months ago. Plus one of my two workmen died suddenly on Friday (fell 25 feel from a tree stand, which is a hunter thing here in the boonies) and dealing with his friend/boss has been very emotional. (It really threw me too, although I barely knew the guy, he’d been practically living at my house for the last two months.)
I did finally get the re-issue of my Veiled Magic books set to go, and they should be available everywhere as of February 1st and are already out in print on Amazon (they didn’t have a print version originally when they were out from Berkley). I’ll try and get my act together enough to send something to Jenny.
And I put in a couple of proposals for new Llewellyn books.
Mostly I’m just working on taxes and trying to weather these storms (both literal and figurative). Is it spring yet?
Sorry about the workman/hunter. I’m not surprised that threw you, anyone with a writer’s empathy and imagination would react to a nasty accident like that.
I am now ashamed that I read this morning of two American CEOs caught in a heli-skiing avalanche here in Canada with a bit of schadenfreude. Somehow we Canadians like shaking our heads at the excesses of our southern neighbors.
I’m so sorry. Sudden death is always a shock
I’m impressed you could do anything at all! The worker’s death is shocking! I hope things settle down for you soon.
I’m sorry about the death of your workman. That must have been a shock. I am still in shock about the murder/suicide of a former coworker this past weekend. He killed his 14 year old daughter, then himself. Apparently he was in despair of the breakup of his marriage. His estranged wife was also a coworker so it was a double shock. I didn’t know either of them well so hadn’t heard about their marriage issues.
Oh no, Rouan. That’s awful.
I’m sorry, Deb and Rouan. Awful shocks for both of you, and for the loved ones of those now gone.
OMG, that’s horrific. I’m so sorry.
Shelves! My hubby and I put together two sets of metal shelves for my studio. It still looks like a bomb went off, but I can see the 72 percent of the floor, so there is hope.
Papers. I finally packed and returned all the papers from my job. Now I have to go through the family papers that piled up. Starting the taxes would also be good…
Any Classified stuff in there? LOL Politics here in America just gets more interesting every day.
I’m quite jealous that no one’s found classified documents in my shed.
Given the random places missing Dr Who episodes have been found, finding classified documents in a shed is probably almost hum drum, I mean I’d prefer one of the missing imperial Faberge eggs or there’s a missing Gustav Klimt of someone’s mother, that her son left to charity if anyone ever finds it
I’m jealous that you have a shed.
Don’t be. Like all sheds, it’s filled with crap.
I remember a time when one of the UW’s couldn’t find a particular file and threw such a hissy fit that all the worker bees got up and searched the office. Nada! The last resort which should have been a first resort was when the department Secretary walked into his space and plucked it off the shelf by his desk.
What are you going to put on these shelves?
I’m taking a short plotting course. I’ve always been a pantster, but my brain fog had made that impossible. After two days of staring into the dark, blank desert that is my brain now, I have a bit of an idea. I can’t tell you how exciting that little thing is to me.
My sympathies on the brain fog. Mine has definitely had an affect on my writing.
I changes everything, doesn’t it?
My princess – Pixie – decided to do her business this morning in the middle of a busy Toronto street during rush hour while about a hundred cars swerved past us. Note my husband helpfully taking this picture as I narrowly avoid death.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1w2NGiq-N7KghVcNmw1ENBQWSWwMsIZiq/view?usp=share_link
Holy shit!! Literally.
Ack! Reflective clothing!
I’m hoping not to make this a thing, so not buying reflective clothing yet. Pixie may have other plans, however….
Tammy, I think you just used up your 15 minutes of fame with a pooping dog. (Someone once quipped something about everyone having 15 minutes of fame.)
I think that was Andy Warhol. And he probably didn’t anticipate that mine would look this way. Sigh.
Get some reflective strips or a sash, cheap and easy, Pixie obviously likes to live on the edge
Oh no! Glad everyone came through unscathed.
I think my husband deserved a little scathing, don’t you?
Tammy, are you a writer? Cuz your dialogue here is up there with Jenny’s.
Ha! Lisa, I am a consultant. I’m strictly a writer wanna-be.
I spent five hours yesterday proof-reading an academic paper for the son of a family friend. Not going to do that again! I do hate academic writing: I’m about clear communication to the maximum audience, not obfuscation to show off to your colleagues. And this was philosophy, which I have no time for. I didn’t realize it’d be so long. He’s a good guy, though, and was just following the rules. I advised him to find a fellow academic next time; though in fact I’ve no idea why the journal that’d accepted it didn’t do the subbing themselves.
Now I’m back to garden design and seed orders. There’s a job due from Penguin any day, but I’m not inclined to chase it.
I’m continuing to work on decluttering/organizing/purging my house. Slow but steady progress. I keep reminding myself that this is a long term goal. After weeks of sourdough starter setbacks, I baked my first loaf of bread and am enjoying the fruits of my labour.
I spent the last few weeks collecting, photographing, and boxing up in their original boxes, small appliances I no longer need, to sell. Yes, I save boxes, I admit it. However, I refuse to save them unless they “take Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior.” LOL As a United Methodist Minister, I was moved fairly often, and saved the boxes each time to make it easier to pack up and get going within a few weeks, so the next appointee could move in. Now I will have to store them in the basement until the weather is more cooperative for selling them.
Humour. Har.😂
I’ve just started writing Wilde & Dangerous now that I’ve gotten the outline pretty solid (she says until she hits the first snafu).
Just curious, Jenny, but why haven’t you changed to the single space after a period? Is it just muscle memory or do you like the look of it better?
Muscle memory, mostly.
Also it annoys Bob, who writes me every morning and says, “Book done yet?”
Ah, annoying Bob. The perks of writing. LOL
Had a week of parental requirements, then a lovely visit from my brother and his new-to-us partner. We really like him, he is very warm, and I like how they are together.
Now, I’m back at my desk staring at piles of paper again. Deep breath, make lists, breathe again, do something, cross off list. Breathe.
Puppy sitting for this afternoon, hope he doesn’t like goose poop.
I finished brainstorming a book, which now gets to simmer in the background until it’s time to write it later in the year. I realized I need to foreshadow some stuff in this book earlier in the series — it’s the third of three books currently planned, so now I need to drop a few tidbits into the first two books. I’ve never planned quite so far ahead before, so it’ll be interesting to see how it works out (or doesn’t).
Have to add today’s big accomplishment, because I’ve been procrastinating it for probably a year, but I finally upgraded my desktop’s RAM from 4 (woefully too little for loading pages online) to 16 (slightly above the minimum recommended 12 for basic online work), and what a difference in makes! More evidence that I will apparently never, never, never learn the lesson that the thing I’m dreading doing will in fact take far less time and be far easier than all the time and angst I put into procrastinating.
I really want this to be true for all the things I want to sort out in the next few months.
I’m hoping I learn that lesson soon! It is ridiculous how much time I waste procrastinating, thinking something will be too hard, when it turns out to be too easy.
The first thing I worked on was taxes. Unfortunately, until I get my SSA-1099 from Social Security, those are at a standstill. I have a W2 and a 1099R from the state retirement system (VRS) and a 1099R from the feds for military retirement. I didn’t own a home/mortgage until 29 December, so it was not an issue. Free Turbotax is waiting on me.
The next thing was unpacking. Yes, I am still unpacking from the less-than-six-mile move. One of my progress bars is the neatly stacking plastic boxes in a part of the basement. There are, however, more of them to go. Part of the issue there is what to do with the contents of the boxes. The wardrobe I originally had was inadequate to hang the clothes I hadn’t boxed. So, I mounted a couple of six-foot round poles to hang everything from. Then I ran out of hangers. At this point, I need to employ my t-shirt folder and get them all put away in the cubes I bought for just that purpose.
Unpacking included taking the farm out of storage. No worries, there. It is all uncrated and disorganized on six three-shelf bookcases against the Garden Wall of the shop. I’m planning to rotate 12 of the gardens lighting up at 8-hour intervals. Since they’re on for 16 hours, 2/3 of the gardens will always be lit. The overhead light will be redundant.
The next thing is another Woman at Work post for my blog, updating the dotter’s efforts at arboreal home decor. I’ve taken pictures which must be edited. I hope to have Woman at Work 2 posted by bedtime.
Woman at Work II is posted.
Home Moanership VII is posted
An Interim January Farm Report is updated (one picture added.)
Click on my name to see them.
Those cubes are a good solution. I’m living in a sleepout now, so efficient storage interests me. And the colours go nicely with your clothes – which you seem to have made easy by having nothing but khaki!
Nothing but khaki?!? There are three pairs of khaki pants and one khaki shirt. I’m wearing one pair of the khaki pants, so it isn’t pictured anywhere. There are seven pairs of forest green pants and three of other green pants and six green shirts. There are other shirts and other pants, none of them khaki. Of the winter coats, all but 1 are green. The one is brown, Carhart, warm-as-toast, but not khaki.
Where did you see all that khaki?
(And thanks for visiting!) 🙂
That green looked awfully like khaki to me :-). Have you thought about branching out into pink?
Branching out into pink? SO not my color. A lot of the green came from uniforms issued by the state. I used to have a couple or six “Hawaiian” shirts, but they wore out, faded, came apart… old age. I don’t think any of my suspenders are pink, either. Two sets of Rainbow suspenders. Blue, green and orange flames. Red, green, and brown suspenders (RGB). Black and yellow caution suspenders. International orange. Camouflage (two types, military and hunter.) But no pink.
Love the now-gray cabinet with milk glass!
Grey? The white cabinet was painted flat black. The dotter is a little bit goth. (The pope is a little bit Catholic.) Just in home decor – no raccoon eyes or black lipstick. Fifteen earrings and a nose piercing, yes. That planter next to the cabinet is a ribcage/spinal cord painted, again, flat black, with plants sticking out all over.
I moved here 8 years ago. Haven’t unpacked everything yet. Yet I regret throwing out some of the things I tossed in the move.
I’m not doing much, or brainwise able to do much, other than super easy knitting or crochet. January turns me into shit.
Bad January! Bad month! No cookie for you!
Hoping your February is a vast improvement.
I made a fairly large batch of split pea soup yesterday so now I have enough to freeze for future use and still have some for a couple of dinners. Tonight I am making a stir fry of chicken, broccoli, onions, and mushrooms with a seasoned rice. Wr are supposed to get a bit of heavy snow this afternoon (bad enough that many of the schools had an early dismissal) so I made sure I have enough books to read and tea to drink to keep me occupied.
I got a whole lot of tiling done, and the utilities cupboard is very nearly completely tiled now. And I got chapter 5 of my current fanfic project finished and posted, so I’m happy about my productivity this week.
I’ve been working at the day job and trying to get things done around the house.
I’ve also done some cooking and baking, I had zucchini that needed to be used up so it’s loaves of zucchini bread and possibly zucchini cookies. This morning I boiled some potatoes to make a potato/pepper/ground pork hash that’s going to be supper tonight (and possibly lunch if I get my act together).
Monday I went for a haircut and had to take 2 dogs with me. Hannah, for some reason, had gotten into Paul’s pill case which was at the back of the kitchen counter and half hidden. Fortunately, she did not eat any of the pills (warfarin and a beta blocker so could have serious consequences for a 60 lb dog) just trashed the case. I understand her being interested in the dish cloths/hot pads/socks/anything that smells good but what on earth prompted her to bypass interesting things and go for the pill case??? Pills now live in the cupboard.
I have library books in but I also have to go out tomorrow for a dentist appointment in the big town so I will get them then.
Pills and dogs: years ago a co-worker came out of the bathroom, door open, doing her hair, to see her ten pound dog chowing down on her migraine pills, that she, weighing far more than ten pounds, was only supposed to take one of at a time. The plastic bottle was in pieces on the floor, and most of the pills were inside the dog. The bottle had been in her purse, closed, on top of the tall dresser. Dog must have jumped from the bed across two feet of floor onto the dresser and opened the clasp of her purse in the time it took her to do her hair. She brought him to work with her and had his stomach pumped immediately and he was fine. But dogs! Pills! There’s an unholy fascination.
Unless, of course, the pills are doggy medicine that must be shot down their throats with an air pistol.
I am, ever so slowly, listing some of my mum’s unworn or in good condition clothes for sale. I took two suitcases full back to my flat, my friend who has a spare room has very kindly taken another suitcase… and twelve bin bags full. I knew she had a lot of clothes, but never comprehended quite how many.
For fun, I’m knitting the world’s easiest scarf in bright colours. One of my coworkers is having it when I’m done, so at least it will go to a good home.
We were out and about today and now I want to go back to Trader Joe’s for the frozen macaroni and cheese balls.
Started a new flash fiction / short story about the woke culture. Just to tickle myself I made the person most sympathetic to woke a narcoleptic.
I will try to put an instagram link to the beautiful anthology that I have 1 poem in.
https://www.instagram.com/p/Cn2aXAzvVm_/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=
It’s just a 31 syllable tanka but I am proud.
Haven’t worked on my novel 😒
Had lunch with two amazing women from my critique group. They’ve been everywhere so I lived vicariously while they talked travel. Then we talked writing. So much fun!
Rearranging the house again due to a gift of spices that don’t fit in the current kitchen arrangement and framed artwork that needs wall space.
Paperwork. Slowly working through the pile, with taxes in there somewhere. And I’ll make chicken vegetable soup later for dinner, yum!
Taxes, which are now done – yay! And that’s been about it, really, other than work-work, which I’m not feeling the love for. It’s summer, I wanna lie outside in the sun and read.
The weekend was 4 hours of yardkeeping, scanning a folder full of old college papers, and cleaning up the 2014 photo archive.
Monday-Tuesday were slow work days so I wrote 6000 words of one novel-in-progress and 2000 words of something I should really not be working on yet. Plus this morning I pitched another story which I now have to write. But at least that one’s not ‘due’ till September!
Did the bare minimum including a mercifully short election board meeting-only three pages of minutes to transcribe.
Today’s snow storm was a bust.
Time for bed.
Clearing covid fog. It took me 5 days to read a Loretta Chase book. I would turn a page and could not remember who the people were. I ordered a lot of stuff on etsy and ebay. It will be like Christmas in February.
I handed in a book right at the end of last year, so unlike Jenny and Bob I’m taking a break while I figure out what I’m going to write next. Meanwhile I’m preparing school talks and workshops for a different book which is coming out in April.
Plus making summer pyjama pants. Bottling apricots. Gardening. And still cleaning out (in a desultory fashion) the Room of Shame.