Maintenance had to come in and do some routine work on my apartment yesterday (replacing some of the outlets in the kitchen, or something like that), and rather than listen to them bang around, I decided to go out and do a little photography:
I like some of the pictures I got, but the session may have been a mistake — I got perhaps six or seven decent pictures, but I got ELEVEN big red itchy bug bites. And I was only out for an hour! …
I haven’t put up a lot of pictures of food lately, but Saturday night I went to a lovely gathering with tacithydra, jess_ka, and ellevate. ellevate brought a fruit tart, and jess_ka brought star fruit, which means I got to eat this:
(It was delicious.)
10433 / 100000
Total words: 15,530
Total usable words: 10,433
Badges earned (since the last post):
Gold Star – For completing the April Challenge of 12k words in the month of April.
For completely scrapping at least 1,000 words and redoing them.
For mentioning a duck, goose or other waterfowl somewhere in your novel.
For completing a chapter that’s a prime number (Ch. 3)
For writing 500 words and working out for 30 minutes every day for a week.
…
My story, “Time to Say Goodnight” made it onto the Million Writers Award list of Notable Stories for 2007! The story appeared in Fantasy Magazine on the last day of 2007, and I’m thrilled that it made the list. A big thank you to Sean Wallace for nominating the story!
* * *
My story is in great company, other Notable Stories include:
“I’ll Gnaw Your Bones, the Manticore Said” by Cat Rambo
“Sea Child” by Aliette de Bodard
“Tabloid Reporter to the Stars” by Eric James Stone
“The Surgeon’s Tale” …
6444 / 100000
No progress report last week, because I spent a lot of time re-writing Chapter 1 and posting my wordcounter bar with a decreased word count would feel too much like going backwards. I think spending a lot of time on the first chapter was worth it though — the early versions were so far off what I wanted that they likely would have thrown the whole trajectory of the story off. The version I ended up keeping (the 5th version) is far from perfect, but it’s close enough that I feel I can move on. (Yay!)
This …
3338 / 100000
April 1st – April 5th
Wordcount: 3338
This week’s word count is all on Chapter 1, which I am still tinkering with. The total wordcount is a bit deceptive, because I abandoned a couple partial drafts of Chapter 1, and haven’t counted those towards the total. I’m still working out details about the characters/setting/plot as I go, so I’m okay with the low wordcount. Hopefully things will eventually click into place and I can pick up the pace.
Badges Earned:
For sitting down and cranking out 500 words when I didn’t …
Last night for dinner I made meatloaf, and some potato-asparagus hash as a side dish. The best part? Leftovers make great sandwiches:
Someone told me that April 1st was a bad day to start a novel, so I started today instead. I wrote one word :) My goal is to write one chapter a week, for however many chapters it takes for the book to be finished.
I’ve located a progress bar:
1 / 100000
Sadly, my one word is insufficient to show up on the progress meter.
Several other members of Codex are also writing novels at the moment, and as further motivation, I will be trying to earn badges, like the one shown below (unlike this sample, most of …
According to popular folklore, it is possible to balance a raw egg* on one end on the equinox. It was a trick my dad used to do sometimes when I was a kid. So if you have way too much time on your hands, you can spend today attempting to balance eggs on end :)
* Okay, I’ll come clean. The egg in the picture is not raw, it’s an “empty egg” where the contents have been blown out through a little hole …
Massively unhealthy side dish, or slightly unhealthy dessert?* Start with some healthy, nutritious sweet potatoes. Cook them. Mash them. Mix in: butter, milk, sugar, egg. Put mixture into a casserole dish. THEN, as if that is not enough, top the casserole with a mixture of pecans/flour/brown sugar/butter(yes, really, more butter).
And another picture, just to prove that there really are sweet potatoes under there:
…
