Crunch and Crumble
Originally published at tansyrr.com. You can comment here or there.
January’s over! Yikes. The end of the school holidays is fast approaching, which is good. I’m not nearly as far along with my rewrites as I wanted to be by this stage, but we can just call that another case of imaginary productivity.
There had better be nothing imaginary about my February productivity. I’m setting myself up for success the best way I can. When I haven’t been able to work, I’ve been building up anti-guilt points, playing with Raeli and setting up activities for her so I don’t feel so bad about disappearing into my laptop in the coming month. My honey is taking off the last week of the school holidays, which means he can entertain her and do the quality time thing while I indulge in reckless abandonment.
And of course there was the other work, the stuff with more immediate deadlines - proofs on proofs, and the last stages of correcting and redoing the maps. Not that I was actually doing the maps, but the last couple of weeks meant several meetings with Mum - the maps themselves were gorgeous but we’ve been juggling the sizing of text and my honey had to come to the party with electronic support and corrections too, managing to save Mum a lot of re-drawing time!
Meanwhile I’ve been reading my book 2 and notetaking and playing with Scrivener, and essentially pre-rewriting. The big work is all going to be done in the last month, though. I’ve worked through the fear and the paralysis stage (don’t know where to start! so much to do! make write better aargh!) and now there’s just the good stuff to do. I’m actually looking forward to it. I can see the shape of the book it’s going to be, and it helps that I’ve spent chunks of January immersed in the minutiae of book 1 - it’s amazing what themes and quirks you can slip into a book without realising it, and it’s only by being forced to read it line by line that you find those clever bits that really need to be elaborated on in later books.
It’s a trilogy I’m writing here, not three books, and it really is the first time I’ve done that - Mocklore was three standalone books, only becoming a trilogy of sorts in the final hour (and besides the wench is dead). I always wanted each book to expand on the previous one, making the story bigger and wider and sometimes changing the way you read the early books - but I’ve lived with Book One for so long now that it’s hard to let it go.
Final proofs are final. It’s gone. No changing it now. Further in, further in!
I finished On Joanna Russ, which is wonderful and crunchy. I’m not going to do a proper review because it’s all academic and what is there to say but - it’s good, really good. My favourite articles were the ones by Gary Wolfe and Helen Merrick and Samuel Delaney, but I got something valuable out of each of them. Getting in touch with that critical, historical part of my brain is marvellous after so long - the end of my PhD left such a bad taste in my mouth that it feels awfully good to dip my toe into academic books again. The history of women’s science fiction was always my guilty pleasure at uni - I would borrow books on it when I was supposed to be reading Pliny or Catullus! I now have The Secret Feminist Cabal, Boneshaker and Lifelode vying for my full attention. (must not turn to Gossip Girl book…)
Anyone who may or may not have been hanging out for more ‘those crazy romans’ posts - I have a stack of DVDs waiting for me to tackle, but haven’t managed to watch any yet because of said school holidays. Somehow when it comes to Waybolu or Mister Maker vs. Demetrius and the Gladiators, I keep losing the vote. Funny that.
It’s aifin’s birthday tomorrow - we were going to go out to fancy dinner because we still had $100 voucher they gave us in hospital as part of the bribery package to make us leave early, so we sent Raeli away on a sleepover to Glammer’s house, but then decided it was far too fancy to drag a baby in with us. Jem is just a touch too old to be easy to manage in a restaurant, but we haven’t done the evening babysitting thing with her yet, so we’ll save the fancy dinner for another few weeks/months.
Instead I took the opportunity to duck into town (the luxury!) and buy some fabric, hunt down the special edition Watchmen DVD for my honey (not a spoiler, I gave it to him early so he could watch it tonight) and then swung by the docks to pick up fresh ingredients for Awesome Soup. Tonight’s awesome soup contained a chowder base, a fresh tail of tuna, chopped, plus scallops, prawns, and - those little clamlike things that start with V and were featured on Masterchef. Gah, vocabularyfail. (they are delicious)
Anyway, we ate it up with lots of bread and butter and champagne, and also ate our way through a carton of fresh pickled octopus. I then proved my love by creating an on-the-spot apricot crumble with fresh fruit friends have given us lately (it’s love-proving cos I hate apricots) and it turned out spectacular, if so sweet that we both gritted our teeth a bit towards the end (tooo much sugggar)
All this and I can spend tomorrow morning working! Or sleeping. Either are good choices! I think I will let Arsenal v. Man United decide. If they beat us, I am so having a sleep in. If we win, I will channel my joyous energy into an awesome battle scene.
COME ON GUNNERS
[EDIT: apparently the game is in fact not tonight at all, but tomorrow night. Which means I have to make a moral choice about the sleep in. Hmm. That's a tricky one.]