Don't you love it when you think, "Argh, I'll never finish this chapter tonight!" and then you look at the last scene on the list, and you realize it has no point that isn't duplicated by the scene you already wrote and the scene that comes after it?

So, suddenly done writing all-new chapter 2. Now I have to get to get chs 1 and 2 whipped into decent enough shape to get them to my crit group tomorrow, and then I can start revising the other 15 chapters in the book. (Except before that, I have to do a few more crits, finish rewriting a short story, and print off another story that's still searching for a home.)


In other "don't you love it when" news, don't you love it when you have one of those dreams that is the Best Story Idea Ever, and your sleeping brain makes an extra-special effort to remember it in great detail so you can write the awesome story, and then you wake up and it was all about time-traveling Tupperware?

Yeah.

Lots of end-of-decade memes going around. Other than the 70s, the 00s were the decade in which my life has changed the most - which makes sense given my age. (And probably the last time my life will change this much in a decade, until some hopefully-very-far-off one.)

At the end of 1999, I was in the middle of my third year of physics grad school, not enjoying it but still figuring I'd do government or commercial research after I graduated. J and I had been dating for a bit over a year, and he'd moved out of state, beginning our long-term long-distance relationship. I was four months away from waking up one morning with a short story idea that turned into a novel and kicked off the whole writing thing. I hadn't met most of you yet (three of you, I think).

At the end of 2009, I have a journalism degree instead of a physics Ph.D. (and got over my fear of strangers as a bonus). I've been doing nonfiction writing and/or editing of various sorts as my job since 2001. I started this journal and renamed it twice. I moved to new cities four times; J moved three times, and we ended up in the same place, got married (promoting him from "the boyfriend" to "J" on this LJ), and bought a house. I've written way more fiction than I thought I would back in 99.

And on other, random notes:

It seems strange that so many pot pie recipes call for measuring the meat in pounds. Isn't cups a better measurement for something that uses leftover meat?

I'm considering doing the photo-a-day thing in 2010, if only for the motivation to post more frequently. (I find downloading-from-camera and uploading-to-web to be tedious, so I'd probably post in batches.) Are any of you actually interested in seeing 300 photos of my desk?

Tagging Interfictions 2 as "genre:fantasy" on LibraryThing is probably missing the point.

I have been playing with Scrivener and have got my current project in there all set up for revisions. Not the actual draft, just the notes: it's a nice way to keep them all in one place. Also, I have figured out how to export various lists of scenes from Scrivener and make Mathematica turn them into color-coded charts of, say, which scenes various characters appear in. (Yes, I have been getting actual writing done as well. But, color-coded charts!)

In addition to the Interfictions anthology, which I got from LibraryThing and therefore have to review, I got two Writers of the Future anthologies (part of my "If I am going to submit to this market, I should read it" philosophy). Sadly Santa did not bring me extra time in which to do this reading.

I recently finished the first book in Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy, which I liked enough to read on my iPod as a converted PDF (from when Tor gave them away) with no paragraph breaks, scene breaks, or italics. I plan to buy the rest of the series as properly formatted ebooks. And I'm almost finished with War for the Oaks, which is very good, but which I probably would have enjoyed more if I'd read it when it first came out.

Merry Christmas!

This novel is still going smoothly. As fun as writing without a plan is, I think getting a coherent first draft instead is a worthwhile tradeoff. I just had to write several books without a plan before I could figure out what goes in a plan...

After Thanksgiving or New Year's I'm going to get the free trial of Scrivener and test its outlining features out on some short stories [1]. (Probably not its word processing functions, though, as I do a great deal of writing on non-Mac devices.) I've been eyeing its pretty corkboard for years.


[1] I really want to write the next novel on my list, but I also really want to write a bunch more short stories. We'll see which desire wins the tug-of-war.

I wanted to make a longer post, but I don't have time, so let me just say:

Doing all the lunges in skating class on the same leg? Not the best idea I've ever had.



(Otherwise it was fun. I'm really getting the hang of the half-lutz, and looking forward to the spring session that starts in Feb. Salchows and toe loops!)