Writing: 1,142 words
Irene was full of sound and fury, but she's done her damage and headed north. And so it goes.
I finished writing on Friday night a little after 12:30 (so, strictly speaking, Saturday morning), then went through my presleep ritual. Then, literally minutes before heading to bed, Irene knocked out the power at 1:30. So Saturday consisted mostly of watching the storm through the front windows, taking cellphone video of a neighbor's tree swaying in Category-1 wind gusts, and trying to keep the baby occupied with crayons and a sheet of brown wrapping paper taped to a tabletop.
After the baby went to bed, I read for two hours by lamplight. It was all very Elizabethan. I got through almost 150 pages of Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games - all of "Part II: The Games" - while my wife finished Frank Abagnale's Catch Me If You Can and read all of Amy Sedaris's I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence. My wife is a fast reader. If she were a superhero, that would be her superpower. I imagine that her archnemesis would be Illiteracy.
But once my wife knocked off to bed, I found myself with a full laptop battery and nothing much else to do. So I wrote. I got a little less than three hours out of my battery on its power-saver setting, and put 1,142 words down on the page to bring the total manuscript up to 86,400. Strictly speaking, most of them would have come out of the bucket if I had been able to reach into that bucket, but it, like all of my writing, is on an external hard-drive, so with the power out, the lid on that bucket was impenetrably sealed.
Instead, I worked on what Dean Smith calls a "redraft," writing the section again from my own memory of the idea. This will undoubtedly serve me well: when I compare the redraft to the original, I expect to find much of the pretentious, overwrought purple prose excised. Not all, I'm sure - I'm still mildly pretentious and a least a little overwrought - but much, and much is more than none according to my current sliding scale of productivity.
So I may yet untangle these literary knots tied by that inexperienced 17-year-old that was me.
In other news: we went without power for 34 hours, until the diligent people at Carteret-Craven Electric Cooperative got the juice running into College Park again at 11:30am today. Perfectly timed, too: we had just laid the baby down for her nap, and were finally able to got some sleep of our own without rolling around in a fetid swamp of our own sweat.
We are very lucky in this regard. There are people right here in town and others in surrounding counties who will not get power back until as late as the first of September. There are people whose houses were massively damaged by uprooted trees. And while I will continue to pursue my trifling literary ambitions even while others must suffer, I will never fail to recognize the strength of those who endure far worse than I.
I finished writing on Friday night a little after 12:30 (so, strictly speaking, Saturday morning), then went through my presleep ritual. Then, literally minutes before heading to bed, Irene knocked out the power at 1:30. So Saturday consisted mostly of watching the storm through the front windows, taking cellphone video of a neighbor's tree swaying in Category-1 wind gusts, and trying to keep the baby occupied with crayons and a sheet of brown wrapping paper taped to a tabletop.
After the baby went to bed, I read for two hours by lamplight. It was all very Elizabethan. I got through almost 150 pages of Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games - all of "Part II: The Games" - while my wife finished Frank Abagnale's Catch Me If You Can and read all of Amy Sedaris's I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence. My wife is a fast reader. If she were a superhero, that would be her superpower. I imagine that her archnemesis would be Illiteracy.
But once my wife knocked off to bed, I found myself with a full laptop battery and nothing much else to do. So I wrote. I got a little less than three hours out of my battery on its power-saver setting, and put 1,142 words down on the page to bring the total manuscript up to 86,400. Strictly speaking, most of them would have come out of the bucket if I had been able to reach into that bucket, but it, like all of my writing, is on an external hard-drive, so with the power out, the lid on that bucket was impenetrably sealed.
Instead, I worked on what Dean Smith calls a "redraft," writing the section again from my own memory of the idea. This will undoubtedly serve me well: when I compare the redraft to the original, I expect to find much of the pretentious, overwrought purple prose excised. Not all, I'm sure - I'm still mildly pretentious and a least a little overwrought - but much, and much is more than none according to my current sliding scale of productivity.
So I may yet untangle these literary knots tied by that inexperienced 17-year-old that was me.
In other news: we went without power for 34 hours, until the diligent people at Carteret-Craven Electric Cooperative got the juice running into College Park again at 11:30am today. Perfectly timed, too: we had just laid the baby down for her nap, and were finally able to got some sleep of our own without rolling around in a fetid swamp of our own sweat.
We are very lucky in this regard. There are people right here in town and others in surrounding counties who will not get power back until as late as the first of September. There are people whose houses were massively damaged by uprooted trees. And while I will continue to pursue my trifling literary ambitions even while others must suffer, I will never fail to recognize the strength of those who endure far worse than I.