It’s Saturday, which means I get to go out and spend some Daddy time in town for a while. It used to be my time for call girls and cocaine, but the recession means I had to scale down to hookers and cheap beer. We all make sacrifices, I guess.
Until I get back, here’s something to watch. It’s an amazing piece of animation that’s cute and awesomely cool at the same time: Goodbye Canine.
Does anyone have an older Mac they’d like to turn into some ammo or beer money?
I need one that has at least a factory-equipped Firewire port, which is the base minimum to run OS X 10.4 “Tiger”. The oldest machines that fit the description are the slot-loading CRT iMacs, 350MHz and faster. I don’t care whether it’s an all-in-one like a G3 or G4 iMac/eMac, a G4 tower, a Mac mini, or an iBook/Powerbook, as long as it works and has a built-in Firewire port.
I want to set up a Mac in my office as a Scrivener-only writing machine for typing up my handwritten stuff into a second draft, and Scrivener needs at least Tiger to run.
I’ll pay you fair market value and shipping, and you get bragging rights on future novel releases, because your old Mac will be the machine that produced the publisher-ready manuscript copy.
The Top Five Most Embarrassing Albums On My iPod:
Sad news item of the morning:
Three-year-old CA girl shoots and kills her younger brother after finding a loaded .45 under her parents’ bed.
Let’s reiterate for a moment:
Guns and small children Do. Not. Mix. If you have little kids and firearms in the house at the same time, you must keep one away from the other. Keeping a loaded pistol under the bed, in the nightstand drawer, or on the shelf in the closet does not constitute safe and responsible storage.
That little boy wasn’t killed by his sister; he was killed by the idiot parent who left a loaded and unsecured pistol in a location that’s practically at eye level of a crawling kid.
Libba Bray wrote a heart-rending and powerful essay on Proposition 8, growing up with a gay father, and the definition of “family”.
Quoted for truth:
There is nothing wrong with being gay. There is nothing wrong with the way you love. Jesus, we should count ourselves lucky that we ever find love at all. Love is hard going and it takes guts and work and self-reflection and constant negotiation, not only with our partners but with ourselves, with our preconceived notions of what’s-what and the ever-ass-kicking reality of what-is. Love is not for the faint of heart—and it’s the best thing we’ve got going. I won’t even go into the ways marriage forces you to grow up. Why would we want to deprive other human beings of this basic right, of this chance to grow? (Or, if you’re into Schadenfreude, the right to feel like you want to scream over the dishes in the sink?) Why do we think it is okay to deny other human beings, other tax-paying citizens of this country, people who teach or doctor or minister to the sick and weary or serve in the armed forces or, hell, hula dance for all I know, the same rights and privileges that are afforded heterosexuals? What crazy act of hubris allows one segment of the population to determine who can love equally under the law?
Go read the whole thing.
The problem:
Kids get shampoo in their eyes at bath time. Shampoo makes their eyes burn. Drama ensues.
Dull textbook solution:
Buy “no tears” shampoo. (Tip: it doesn’t work as advertised.)
Creative Happy Fun Time solution:
Shampoo goggles!
The Romans had a quote about artistic productivity that goes “Nulla Dies Sine Linea”—“No Day Without A Line”. It applied to painters, not writers, but the principle translates to writing just the same. I’ve adapted it for myself as “No Day Without A Page.”
One page a day—that’s my minimum quota for new fiction. A page is not a whole lot of writing. Actual word count depends on your handwriting or font settings, but on average, a page comes out to roughly 250 words.
There are few days when I get only 250 words down on paper. Most of the time, I overshoot that minimum goal by a fair margin, because once I’m on a roll, I get a lot more done before reaching a natural stopping point. On most days, I get between 3-5 pages done, which comes out to 750-1,250 words. The “page a day” rule is a mental trick to get started, because I know I’m allowed to quit after a page, and because I know I probably won’t. Still, there are those days when your brain feels like it’s been coated in a viscous mix of molasses and Novocain, when you have to wrestle every new word from your synapses in a mental struggle, and on those days, I’ll take the 250 words…but not a word less. That pen doesn’t leave my hand until I’ve covered a whole page in words and sentences, with a minimum of crossed-out stuff.
It doesn’t take very long to write 250 words. On the computer, I can do it in ten minutes. By hand, it takes more like twenty, but it’s still a manageable slice of time that most anyone can carve out of their day, regardless how busy their schedules are. Twenty minutes—that’s part of a lunch hour, or just a cup of tea at the end of the day, or getting up just a bit earlier than usual. A page a day is not a prolific rate of production, but it’s like the race between the turtle and the hare—slow and steady gets you to the finish line, too, and more reliably than not starting the race at all. If you only manage a page a day, you know what you’ll have in just a year? A 90,000-word novel, that’s what.
(As an example of scale: this post comes out to 430 words, almost twice the “page a day” minimum. Doesn’t seem like much, does it? Think that’s a manageable amount of writing for a day? Then don’t use—or buy—the excuse about “not having enough time to write.”)
We had a lovely Memorial Day weekend. On Sunday, Robin made the best home-cooked barbecue ribs in the history of barbecue ribs. (I think I polished off a whole rack by myself.)
The weekend itself was a busy one—lots of stuff to do around the house in preparation for the summer and the renovation teams. I mowed the lawn for the first time this year. Our front lawn is maybe half an acre in size, and my little push mower went through a full tank of gas. We also did some housecleaning, and took delivery of a new pellet stove, to replace the wood stove in the living room area. With the pellet stove in place, we’ll have three different heat sources in the house, one of which works even when the power is out—two propane furnaces, a pellet stove, and a wood stove.
Our roof is going to be installed in the first week of June, and then we can start the interior repairs. We’ll need to replace the ceilings and floors in three rooms due to water damage, which will (thankfully) be covered by our homeowners insurance. Then there’s the issue of the porch, which will need to be fixed. (The first estimate we got was $6,000.) I’m starting to think there’s no limit to the amount of cash we can pour into this place to improve and repair it, but at least the big issue will be fixed by the time winter comes around again.
With all that yard work, cleaning, and filling up on ribs and beer, I didn’t get much writing done over the weekend—three pages on Saturday at the coffee shop, and another three pages last night, when I decided I was still fresh enough to catch up on work a little and get an early start into the work week. On the plus side, the Final Conundrum in which our heroes find themselves is loud and exciting and awesome, and it sets the stage for the sequel rather nicely.
That’s the state of affairs at Castle Frostbite. How was your Memorial Day weekend?
With the tears a Land hath shed
Their graves should ever be green.
~Thomas Bailey Aldrich
More substantial updates later, when I’m not quite so deluged with work from all sides…
