I know there are a few folks who read this who aren’t dialed into Clarion West and LJ (I hope that link works because my computer is choking on it right now) deal.
My classmate Carlton Mellick III has a story in Vice which you can read here.
Or, even better, you can hear it by the voice who tells you which register to use at Whole Foods here
Highly recommended.
This morning I turned on the TV to see if there was anything traffic related I should know about. The ruddy-faced weatherman announced that there was some cabin-fever in Stumptown. The roads were crowded but all the schools were shut down.
I penned him a polite note when I got in, informing him that teleportation hadn’t been invented yet and that people use cars to go to work, too.
I’m wearing what I consider to be my most heavy-duty wool pants. They’re also my vintage wool pants. My mom gave them to me a long time ago. When she first gave them to me, I still lived in California and didn’t understand how wonderful wool pants are.
But then for a long time I couldn’t fit into them. Now I can fit into them and I love wool.
The only thing is that they are the most high waisted pants on the planet. The waistband is bumping against the bottom of my ribcage right now. I didn’t like the low waistband thing for a long time. But now that I’m used to it, the high waistband is uncomfortable and for reasons I’m guessing are juvenile flashbacks, feels super dorky.
I went to Pendleton a couple months ago to look for new heavy-duty wool pants, assuming they’d updated the cut since these ancients ones I’m wearing were made. Nope. Up-to-my-armpits waistband. Maybe I should pen them a polite note.
This is how I took it and now I’m wondering if I should flip it. No, too lazy.
Bob and I are both home today. It’s sunny outside and according to our highly accurate backyard temperature measuring device, it’s 28 degrees. It’s also really windy. We don’t want to turn into winter lumps so we decided to go for a walk. We piled on layers of clothes, hats and mittens and headed out into the bright coldness.
What do you think this thing is for? It’s a retired tea kettle on a stick. It’s lined up with a couple of other bird feeders so I guess it’s a birdfeeder but not sure how that would work. Maybe it’s just outdoor art.
We originally thought we’d take this long route by Burnt Bridge Creek but we started heading east into the wind and our noses turned blue and it was so ugly we almost turned around right then.
But we thought we’d at least hang in for a couple of blocks and once we got around the first corner it wasn’t so bad. But we never made it to the creek.
The holiday load has been manageable so far. I’ve got a few errands left but nothing to freak out about. It’s the rest of my load that I can’t seem to catch up on. My email box is stacked and I owe from way back at the beginning of November. Every day I try to go through at least ten but by the end of the day at least twelve more have come in. I unsubscribed from every company email list I’m on because they were all sending me things every single day. Too much crap.
And I have a million of those little things you have to do that probably won’t take that long but you never seem to get to them. I need to find my camera book and figure out what magical combination of buttons I pressed that makes the display screen all wonky. I need to find all the stuff for our natural gas account and put it in the same folder. I need to update the family address list and distribute. I need to clean out this drawer in my bathroom where hair product spilled. I should probably go look for the lens cap to my camera. I’m 99% sure I lost it at home but I’m afraid it fell off when I went outside and walked around the yard and don’t really feel like bundling up and looking right now. I was hoping it would be on my desk but no luck.
I know, don’t you wish I’d go on?
This is Mt. St. Helens with an old farm that’s still in the neighborhood. There was a chainlink fence and I lifted my camera up over the top to take the picture and when downloaded it from the camera I was surprised by how well I aimed.
Yesterday the weatherman said we could expect 1-3 inch accumulations overnight. You can imagine my disappointment when I ripped the windowshade open this morning and saw this. It looks like someone shook a bag of flour out of an open car window as they drove by.
It picked up again later but there was never enough to cover anything.
I don’t know how Laura Ingalls survived that Long Winter. I ran out to the backyard to see how things were progressing. It’s windy and 30 degrees. I ran back inside and stood on the heating vent in the living room until I stopped shivering. Laura Ingalls probably wasn’t stupid enough to run outside in her pajamas.
Now I’ve also revealed that I never changed out of my pajamas today. Well, at 3:30 I took them off and put on sweatpants. But I’m wearing the sweatpants to bed so it wasn’t like I traded up.
Every time I plan to have a lazy day, the opposite happens. I guess there are worse problems.
I wrote most of the morning. Then I Bob and I had a hot lunch. Then I decided to bake a loaf of bread so I could make fresh bread Nutella toast when I felt like a snack while being inside on a snow day.
By the time I had the kitchen all cleaned up it was 3:30. So I changed into my sweatpants, as mentioned earlier, and then fired up a crackle log and sat down and watched a Firefly. It was the one where there’s a fancy ball and Kaylee wears this crazy pink dress and Mal has to swordfight this guy who wanted to make Inara his personal companion.
Now I’m cleaning off my desk while I wait for the bread to come out of the oven.
I think after dinner we might watch Iron Man from Netflix or we still have a million Life on Mars on the DVR. I guess it’s a half lazy day.
Long week in terms of sitting at the computer and getting stuff done. Completely beat.
Out of town on business until late Friday night. Two social events Saturday.
Perhaps decent update on Sunday.
Note: I don’t know what to do to make it look less green. Every Photoshop trick in my very limited skill set just makes it look worse.
A week or two ago I made chicken pot pie using this recipe. As we were serving it up he said we had to have a picture of it.
Bob ate very quietly and about every five minutes he would look at me with damp eyes and say, “This is really good.”
I was going to write a quick post about how much I hate baby carrots. I might have covered this topic. I like to peel and cut my carrots myself.
Just out of curiosity I asked my favorite search engine where baby carrots come from. And this is what I learned.
I still don’t want to eat them but I don’t hate them any longer.
Erin’s workplace
Good News: my desktop computer is back home and working like a dream. No lost data. Yeah.
However, I didn’t expect to be running across town to pick it up this morning so my day is off to a crooked start. I gotta pull myself together and get on top of a few things.
Every year I buy advent calendars for the office. Wow, only $1 from Trader Joe’s what a screaming deal. This year the chocolates, in addition to being microscopically tiny, taste so horrible they could possibly be toxic. I had to eat a See’s Candy to get the taste out of my mouth.
So now what do we do? Do I open the window for each day and then throw the candy away? Do I throw the entire calendar away? That ruins the fun of the advent calendar. But then, the nuclear waste candy has already done that.
This is funny because last year I had three advent calendars (2 were gifts and extremely yummy) and I couldn’t eat the chocolate fast enough.
I’m overwhelmed by commerce right now. When I got back from three days offline over the long weekend I had about 30 emails waiting for me. Fourteen were from entities wishing I would buy something. Everyone wants me to buy things. Pendleton wants me to buy embroidered blankets, men’s bathrobes, wool pants. It’s a new thing every single day. Ann Taylor is smothering under the weight of all those sweaters that I should be buying two for the price of one.
I did finally succumb to Prana’s love taps because those 70’s cords are awesome.
* * *
You know those people who wander through Target, slowly pushing their carts aisle by aisle, the whole time jabbering on the phone? I’m not talking about people who are checking up on the shopping list. I’m talking about the people who seem to think that the whole point of Target is to provide a big red cart and mountains of product to look as one talks on the phone.
I think it should be legal for me to punch them in the face. Not only that, I think I should get paid for it. And all the other customers should stand on something and applaud when I walk by.
I didn’t sign up officially. This was self-directed NaNo. I fully expected to fail when I started mostly because my work days are long and I didn’t think I would be able to do 1667 words on those days. Especially not for a full month.
I was wrong.
The final word count is around 50,300. I can’t tell you the exact number because it’s trapped in the guts of the dead computer. My best day was 2630. My worst day was 725 – but that day I was working on another writing project that I didn’t count toward my NaNo. I wrote prose-fiction every single day for 30 days and now it feels like habit.
My NaNo project was expanding a story from another project. I was only partially successful. I wrote about 44,000 words on that and it has a beginning, middle and end although there’s a little gap in there that I haven’t figured out how to fix yet. I’m confident it’s dreadful but I’ll be curious to look at it down the road and see if it’s as bad as I think.
I realized about three days in that I had the wrong POV character and shifting the focus would involve a complete re-thinking which I didn’t have time to do under the circumstances. I may revisit the story with a different approach on the POV. I haven’t decided. My expectation was that it was an exercise. I didn’t expect to write a real novel in a month.
With my leftover words I wrote three first drafts of short stories.
I’ve never been a big fan of word count goals because I don’t work that way. I wrote something about my process in April of this year. Choice quote if you don’t want to go back and read it:
A typical writing cycle for me goes: get new idea, rabid excitement, research and tons of writing, get stuck, dread the writing chair, avoid writing, hate myself for avoiding it, despair, force myself to go back to it, find what interested me in the first place, finish story.
For the record, there’s a bale of stuff in my files that’s still waiting for the part that comes after “despair.”
It’s funny to read this after Clarion West.
At CW I had to finish a short story in a week so I had to get over the despair (and if you read my posts while I was there, despair was still a part of the process) and move on very quickly. So the lesson there was that stories feel like crap in the middle. Get over it and do it any way. Or put another way, I could write more quickly than I thought I could because I didn’t have the luxury of being stuck for very long.
I also learned that I can write when I’m tired, hungry, cranky and not in the mood for writing. I can write late at night. I can write after lunch. With music. After interruptions. I had previously believed I could only write first thing in the morning and if I was interrupted the day was ruined. (Barely exaggerating.)
When I got home from CW, I had a hard time getting back into writing again and figuring out how to balance real life with writing. NaNo was a good exercise to make me find time to write every day and get over the idea that CW offered an ideal writing environment that could never repeated at home. And I learned I can write after work. I can write on the bus. I can write before bed after an evening function that includes adult beverages. I could write in short little bursts between other activities, although still not my ideal.
Now I’m a fan of the word count although 50K in a month is too many. My writing was exceptionally sloppy at that pace. I’d rather write less words that come out on the page more orderly. My goal for December is 20K.
Another thought that I don’t know where to shoehorn in is that having and sticking to word goals (and starting in January, submitting things for publication goals) is that I rarely feel panicked and annoyed that I’m not writing.
What didn’t happen during November? I only read one book. I only looked at the Sunday NYT one time which was the 30th after I reached my goal. I had to schedule my TV time so I wouldn’t get too far behind. (Yeah, I realize TV would be an awesome thing to give up. But I don’t watch that much and I don’t want to give it up.) I exercised about 15 minutes a week. I owe a zillion emails. I only did about a third of my normal autumn garden activities. I’m not beating myself up too much on this because we had a super busy month with social activities. I feel I’m on the verge of finding a way to balance it all. But I do wish I read more books.
I feel like I have lots more to say on this but also like I’ve gone on long enough. It’s very funny to look back on how much things have changed in a year.
