The Office

I love this time of year. Of course, it snowed Saturday. But everything had melted by Sunday morning, and I have the blisters to prove I actually got some yard work done before relaxing in the sun, Pina Colada in hand.

It was so gorgeous out this afternoon that I moved the office outside. Not only did I get in some critique work, but I finished chapter six and seven in the editing / revision of my own work. Maybe I'll finish chapter eight tomorrow?

And yes, my cat is wearing a sweater. He has a scratching problem, and this is the punishment / cure.

Ta-da!

Squeeeeee! This is my first post on my brand-spanking-new MacBook Air!! I feel like I've been waiting for this for years!

Oh, wait. I have been.

It really is awesome though. I don't know what else to say. I was running a six-year-old iBook G4 up to this point, so pretty much anything would be better, faster and smoother. I've got all my old files transferred over and installed all the software I wanted. I didn't take much music, since I keep my music library on the MacMini and just share the library. Brought over my favourites though, for travel purposes: Rammstein, Iced Earth, We Are The Fallen, She Wants Revenge, Foo Fighters, The Fray and Nine Inch Nails. Plus a few writing-specific playlists that I never leave home without :D

The other #squee item is that I've installed the trial version of Scrivener and spent that last three hours playing around with it. I gotta say... love it. I really don't care which program I use for composition, but Scrivener's organization of my timelines, comments, notes, character and scene sketches, etc. is absolutely wonderful.

I'll stop playing tomorrow morning though and buckle down on editing chapters twelve and thirteen. Promise.

Less than 24 hours...

I'm going out after work tomorrow to buy my new MacBook Air! This poor iBook is seeing it's last days. Well, sort of. I'm going to recycle it to my dad, who's running an even older computer. And they've changed the forecast (again) for the long weekend, giving us mostly sunny skies. Things are definitely looking up!

I finished re-writing chapter ten today, and got started on twelve and thirteen. Those will be hefty changes, so it might take a few days to finish them up. Plus, I'll be spending another good chunk of time setting up my new Mac and checking out Scrivener, which I think I'll go ahead and buy as well...

Itchy.

Well, please disregard yesterdays post, I guess. It's true, my hard drive has failed. But my new computer won't arrive until Friday (at the earliest) so I got the morning off work. Spent some of that time reviewing the major changes I want / need to make to I Had to Fall. Right now I'm mulling over the fight and conversation between two characters, right at the point where they first meet, in chapters twelve and thirteen. It doesn't flow the way I want it to, and the dialogue doesn't achieve the information I want to present. It needs work. But before I can get to those changes, I need to go back a bit further and makes some conversational tweaks to chapter ten. Nothing too major - I know what needs to be said, and even have some rough dialogue ready - but if I don't set it up now it might screw with the changes further along.

So, if tomorrow's schedule goes as well as today's did, I should have chapter ten pretty much in the bag and ready to move onto the changes needed in twelve and thirteen. Excellent.

Not so excellent: got about a hundred mosquito bites while mowing the grass yesterday. Mosquitos in Calgary. Who knew.

Oh! And countdown to my new macbook air has been revised... I'm thinking I'll go buy it a couple days before my birthday (impatient, I know) so I can have it for the whole weekend. Which means: only 2 days to go!!!!!

JuSt a biT cHaoTic

I'm a digital person. I really am. I never carry cash, my iPhone may as well be embedded in my forearm, I spend all day at work on a computer and then all evening on my laptop.

I like to think that being digital keeps me more organized. But right now, not so much. I just closed off my writing files for the night. I had 7 text files of notes open, 2 Pages documents (the draft and the synopsis), the thesaurus, the calendar, 4 Firefox tabs to Wikipedia articles, and 2 Numbers files. Wow. I manage to keep track of everything I need, but still. A bit on the ridiculously-chaotic side.

Because of said chaos, I'm excited to try Scrivener, once I get my new mac. It looks like just the thing I need to help organize this digital mess. I wonder what other authors do? Kim Harrison has blogged about it, but I think I'll go on a little Tweet campaign and ask around. Might get some interesting answers.

Coundown to Macbook Air: 12 days!!

PS. Funny thing: I still do my taxes long-hand on paper. Sure, I telefile it once it's done. But there is still a bit of paper in my life... once a year :P

Mmmm... Spring!

I love spring. Honestly. Days like today are worth all the long, cold winter this country can throw at me. It was a balmy 10°C out there today, no wind and lots of sun. In September I'd have said it was cold, the windows would be closed and heat running. After a suffering through five months of winter... it's warm, windows open, heat off!

But enough of that weather stuff. I finished my comments and notes for I Had to Fall today, making it all the way from chapter fourteen to the end of the book. I've got a house full of people tomorrow, so I might not get a chance to work on the actual re-write, but I've still got Sunday. I love long weekends, too.

Oh, I also bought new lawn furniture today. It's all setup under the sunshade and ready to be used... for outdoor writing on a new macbook air... only 30 days! 

Happy Earth Day, by the way :)

Experimentation

I'm an avid reader of Kim Harrison's blog, by the way. Her writing advice is what made me take up the pen (well, keyboard really) in the first place, and got me into this whole mess. One of the things she's repeatedly mentioned is that the writing process is a not a science, that it changes and evolves.

Today, my process evolved.

So far I've been tackling the re-write chapter by chapter. I've copied comments into the document from the last hard copy I printed out (more on that another day), read my notes for important changes to the world, characters and plots, re-read each chapter and made new notes, then gone back and re-written the chapter. Then all over again for the next chapter.

I feel slogged (what does slogged mean? not sure. I'm going with sluggishly-bogged-down) by that process. Jumping from notes to writing and back again. Instead, I'm going to try working all those notes and changes into document comments during one big read-through, then go back to the beginning and just write. Everything I need to change will be there, just a matter of re-writing it nicely. 

Wish me luck.

Also, countdown to Air: 34d

Shifting Gears

Yeah, today did come together more smoothly than yesterday did. I finished re-writing chapters seven and eight, and got about halfway through chapter nine. I've still got some concerns, but so far the re-write is cleaning up a lot of the ugly writing and building a much more solid world around Deyl and her friends. And enemies. Stronger story, better writing. All good things.

And those concerns I've got? Basically, how will these changes affect the overall story. But I figure, once I've got all the major changes done I'll spend a few more days re-reading the whole thing just to tweak and polish the finished story. Yeah, it will all work out. I'm sure of it.

So I'll hope that my work schedule is a bit more under control this week, get in an extra day of writing on the long weekend, and really shift gears back into writing mode.

Also: super-excited to get my new Air next month. Do you know how old this iBook is? Well, it's an iBook for starters, so that tells you something. I need to update. Badly. If I go out and buy the Air on my birthday (which is the plan...) I'm officially on a 35 day countdown!!