The Dragon Roars
Got my first full day of dictated writing done, and I think it went pretty well. I worked on cleaning up the house while I did it, though I didn’t start getting on a tear until the end of the day, when I actually had to stop to pick up the kids from school. Would figure. I didn’t think I’d gotten all that much done, but this morning when I did the word count, I actually got over 2k done. If I’d gotten on the tear much earlier in the day, I probably could have doubled that. On the positive side, I’m eager to write the part I’m at now, so things aught to go pretty well today.
I also took the sketch book to baseball practice again, and this time dragged along my copy of The Codex Borgia. I did two sketches, though only one of them is worth sharing:
Aztec Water Glyph
Yesterday I thought it was some kind of funky bird, but after consulting The Aztec Book of Destiny, turns out that it’s a glyph for the day Water, which is the 9th of the 20 Aztec Name Days. I like how the artist of the Codex Borgia personified the water glyph. There’s a lot of really cool stuff to draw in that book.
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September 29, 2011 No Comments
Doing What’s Necessary
I’ve still been struggling with actually putting words down on the page, so it was time for drastic measures: time to pull out the Dragon again. Though this presented certain issues of its own; apparently, my new PC configuration doesn’t like the wireless headphone connection and sends my wireless internet adapter into a tizzy whenever I plug in the dongle. Strange because it didn’t used to do that before the disk crash and rebuild. So I couldn’t install dragon on my desktop computer, which is probably just as well anyway because using it there only allows for pacing around my office and up and down the hall about 5 steps.
That left the Mini, though before I could install Dragon on it, I needed to free up some disk space–a lot of disk space. I ended up stripping the Mini down to bare basics: a word processor (I took off MSOffice and installed just the WP for OpenOffice), deleted all the Window’s games and numerous accessories, and dumped my antivirus. This, of course, means no more internet surfing, so I got rid of Firefox as well. I don’t mind the lack of internet on it though; it always loaded so very slow, and the computer is running much faster now that Norton is gone. I also got rid of all those extras HP added when they installed Windows, so start up is way faster than before. As for internet, my Iphone has pretty much taken the place of the Mini for traveling, so the only reason to have internet on the mini is for Dropbox and Windows Updates, though I’m considering going back to transferring files via a thumb drive just so I don’t clutter the place up with files (and I can free up more space by uninstalling Dropbox.). I’ve looked into the possibility of upgrading the Mini’s harddrive, but it doesn’t look like an easy task, so that’s not any serious option at this point.
The good news is that the Dragon is working like a champ on my newly bare-bonesed Mini, and the though the wireless headset does seem to play tricks with the wireless internet connection, it doesn’t really matter. This computer is now only for writing. And OpenOffice seems to work fine for dictation (though converting to doc from docx produces some funny results when looked at on my PC. I’ll have to copy and paste into my docx file at the day because the doc file is totally screwed up now (has weird characters in the header and it took about half of my comment and pasted them as plain text at the bottom of the document.)
The installation and cleanup of the Mini took most of the day, so by the time I was ready to start working, it was already time to start making dinner. No issue though: I decided to dictate and do dishes and cook at the same time. And it worked out remarkably well. I managed just under 1.2k during that hour (a very sloppy 1.2k), so I’m keen to see how much I can get done with a full day to work on it. I did notice I became very mentally exhausted after that hour of work, so I think frequent breaks for naps and recharging my brain will be necessary, but I’m eager to get to work today.
I shall report the results tomorrow.
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September 28, 2011 No Comments
Back to Work, Ye Scurvy Dog!
So the last month or so hasn’t been particularly productive for me, but now that the kids are back in school and I have no more vacations and conventions ahead of me until next summer, I’m determined to get back to work and finish this novel. I’ve finished the first two parts out of three and have spent the last week trying to find the motivation to outline the last third, without much success. It’s obvious that I can’t wait around for inspiration to strike, so to hell with the muse. He’s being lazy, so the hard-knuckled editor is now here to beat him with a stick. I will write 3k today even if it means having to stay up late to get it done. No excuses, no laziness. Ass in chair, fingers on the keyboard, and no internet until at least 1k is gone. The editor is pissed and he doesn’t take kindly to whining. The work day will not end until I reach 70k, at minimum.
Tally-ho!
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September 7, 2011 No Comments
About Half-Way There
If I’m aiming for the original word count of 120k, I’m at the halfway mark, but I’m not quite ready to call it 120k yet, so:
(60.08%)
Either way, I’m doing pretty awesome. First draft won’t be done in time for WorldCon like I’d hoped, but hopefully soon after that. I should be able to concentrate more once the kids are back in school. They were gone most of yesterday, at the pool with friends, and I got a lot of work done when the house was silent and I didn’t have to prepare lunch.
So things are going well and I’m finally starting to reestablish a pace of sorts, not quite up at the 3k a day I’d been hoping for, but pretty close. I’m averaging over 2k a day at the moment.
In other news, WorldCon is just about two week away now. I’m not on any programming, which means I get to relax and go watch my friends wax philosophical on numerous subjects. It should be good times, though if Reno is anything like Vegas, the BarCon portion could be much different than at previous WorldCons (less cozy and a lot louder).
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August 2, 2011 2 Comments
Struggling to Regain the Pace
So I’ve been struggling to regain that uber awesome pace I had prior to the 4th of July holiday weekend, but pretty much I’ve gotten maybe 5k done since then. Vacations are hard to recover from, plus there’s been the normal distractions of kids’ practices and games. I did have a really great writing day last Saturday, almost 3k words. I also put a huge stopper in my progress when I realized that the story would be better off told in 3rd person rather than 1st and so spent all of Monday working to convert the 200 pages I have so far. I’m still not done (I lost yesterday to having to recover from a minor surgical procedure I had in the morning. Spent most of the day on Vicadin and trying to find something my stomach would keep down.). It’s back to it today, hopefully to finish the conversion and get back to work where I left off. I’m starting the story earlier than previously, so while I technically am rewriting, I’m still keeping my previous beginning; it’s just now somewhere closer to the middle. And interesting things I hadn’t anticipated are happening, and deepening the thematic elements of the story. And I have a new character (she’s a character from the other books, but she’s playing a minor role here; important, but minor.). So while I’m disappointed at my rate of progress, I am terribly excited about where things are moving with the book.
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July 20, 2011 3 Comments
