Daily life: Counting my past wordage
"My biggest writing mistake is that I can't leave well enough alone. Even after the manuscript has come back from the various proof-readers I use, inevitably, the urge to pick a scab overrules all logical sensibility."
--C. Anne Gardner. Because, um, yeah.
For newcomers: Background to my writing entries | Background to my mentoring entries | Background to my simplicity entries | Background to my home entries.
How I reply to comments at this blog.
*** 8 November 2009. Writing: Wordage and my Internet addiction (a look at the past).
While skimming through my journals for entries on "Blood Brothers," I happened across an August 1980 entry that reported I'd written approximately 162,500 words in 1979.
By comparison, I wrote 193,140 words last year. These days, I'm a full-time writer with a computer. In 1979, I was a full-time student who wrote stories by hand.
The 1979 word count is impressive as heck. Coincidentally, last night I began doing the tedious but rewarding task of figuring out my wordage count for the 1995-2005 period (2006 being the year when I began keeping careful records of my daily wordage). This involves going back to the original drafts of my stories, checking the word count of each dated section, and recording the results separately.
Five hours of work yielded me the wordage for 1997-2000. I don't have any firm conclusions yet about whether my writing has declined in recent years, for my golden years of fiction-writing were 1995-1996 and 2002-2003. But I can see quite clearly the path of my Internet addiction, as reflected in the wordage. See for yourself; these are the number of days during which I wrote in each month.
o--o--o
December 1996: 12 days.
January 1997: 17 days.
February 1997: 14 days.
( February 1997 is when my Internet addiction began.)
March 1997: 0 days.
April 1997: 1 day.
May 1997: 0 days.
June 1997: 0 days.
July 1997: 0 days.
August 1997: 0 days.
September 1997: 0 days.
October 1997: 0 days.
November 1997: 0 days.
December 1997: 1 day.
January 1998: 1 day.
February 1998: 0 days.
March 1998: 0 days.
April 1998: 5 days.
May 1998: 1 day.
June 1998: 0 days.
July 1998: 0 days.
August 1998: 0 days.
September 1998: 3 days.
October 1998: 1 day.
November 1998: 0 days.
December 1998: 0 days.
January 1999: 1 day.
February 1999: 0 days.
March 1999: 1 days.
April 1999: 6 days.
May 1999: 1 day.
June 1999: 0 days.
July 1999: 0 days.
August 1999: 9 days.
(Beginning in August 1999, I evidently made an effort to pull myself away from the Internet.)
September 1999: 2 days.
October 1999: 6 days.
November 1999: 14 days.
December 1999: 3 days.
(In December, I let myself be persuaded to become Co-Webmaster of a flame-ridden discussion board that required 24-hour supervision. The Webmaster promptly absconded, leaving me holding the baby.</i>)
January 2000: 1 day.
February 2000: 0 days.
March 2000: 5 days.
(Notice that I keep having higher wordage counts around this time of the year. That's because I was giving up the Internet for Lent. Or trying to.)
April 2000: 0 days.
May 2000: 2 days.
June 2000: 0 days.
July 2000: 0 days.
August 2000: 9 days.
(In August, I quit as Co-Webmaster of the discussion board.)
September 2000: Wrote 1 day.
(And promptly volunteered to be a moderator.)
o--o--o
That's the end of my fiction-writing for 2000. In January 2001, I became partially sighted, and in January 2002 I discovered the glories of online fiction, which gave my Internet addiction a new form for a while.
Overall, I wrote 185,179 words between 1997 and 2000 - in other words, I wrote about as much in four years as I had written in 1979. But you know, the reason why I mentioned my previous year's word count in my August 1980 entry was because I also recorded my word count from January to August 1980.
Nine thousand words. Me slacking off is nothing new.
*** 11 November 2009. Writing: My ability to write descriptions.
It's becoming increasingly clear that my inability to write descriptions is due to the fact that I simply haven't paid attention to my surroundings for forty-six years. It's also becoming increasingly clear that this is clogging the arteries of my fiction-writing.
The two things that have made this clear is my visit to Hoopers Island and my visit to Riversdale Mansion (the latter of which I'll write about separately, next time). In both cases I came home and wrote scenes with relative ease. I say "relative" because, even in these cases where I was carefully scrutinizing my surroundings with the aim of writing about them, I found that I couldn't remember much about my surroundings afterwards.
There's a game you play as a child (or you do you have a decent education - or, in my case, a decent public library): You scrutinize a picture, memorizing everything you see in it, and then try to remember what was in the scene. It's presented as a game to children, but it's really an exercise to check children's ability to see and remember.
It's a game I find I'm returning to. I've been reading picture books for the last month - simply because their large print is the only type of print I can read at this time of year without hurting my eyes - and, while a lot of the illustrations are unmemorable, there are some that I found myself scrutinizing with great care. And the longer I scrutinized them, the more that I realized how little I see of a scene on first look . . . or second . . . or third . . . or tenth . . .
I think continuing to scrutinize artwork closely will help improve my powers of observation. But I need to do more exercises along those lines, because it's my inability to be able to imagine the sensory aspects of a scene that makes it so difficult for me to write down the stories in my head.
*** 11 November 2009. Simplicity: And the computer file purge continues.
I was down to less than a gigabyte of space on my hard drive, so tonight I did what I should have done a while back: I did a Windows search on my hard drive for all files above 10 megabyte, then started with the biggest files and purged everything that I no longer needed (or never did need) or that was a duplicate of something I had elsewhere on my hard drive.
I simply skimmed the list, and am only one-fifth of the way through it, but I've already cleared out a gigabyte and a half. The big problem really is with my research material for the 1960s/retrofuture portion of Prison City. A lot of that takes the form of videos or large images. All told, I have nearly six megabytes' worth of material awaiting me. And I can't view or delete any of that before next summer.
I really need extra storage space for ephemeral research material. My apprentice has his eye out for a cheap DVD writer for me, but he hasn't turned up anything yet.
In the meantime, this sort of purging is a good lesson in slimming down, even if it's frustrating that the files I least want to keep usually turn out to be 15 kilobytes in size, while the ones I most want to keep are half a gigabyte.
*** 11 November 2009. Writing: More schoolboy fiction.
I just finished reading "Fifth Form at St. Dominic's" (1887), by Talbot Baines Reed, whose sole crime, in the eyes of literary critics, seems to be that he was popular. As Frank Eyre dryly puts it, Reed brought school fiction "to a perfection of unreality that later writers could only copy."
I found the novel entertaining. Its theme wasn't deep ("Don't cheat"), but the plot was fast-paced, and the characters all had distinct personalities.
I was particularly taken with Pembury, the ironic editor of the fifth-form newspaper. Here he is, taking advantage of the ignorance of a new boy.
o--o--o
"Here, Tony," suddenly shouted Ricketts to Pembury, who was jogging along on his crutches a little way ahead, towards the school; "do you mind showing this kid the way up? I have to go back with Wren. There's a good fellow."
"Well, that's cool," replied Master Pembury; "I'm not a kid-conductor! Come on, youngster; I suppose you haven't got a name, have you?"
"Yes, Stephen Greenfield."
"Oh, brother of our dear friend Oliver; I hope you'll turn out a better boy than him, he's a shocking character."
Stephen looked concerned. "I'm sure he doesn't mean to do what's wrong," began he, apologetically.
"That's just it, my boy. If he doesn't mean to do it, why on earth does he do it? I shall be sorry if he's expelled, very sorry. But come on; don't mind if I walk too fast," added he, hobbling along by Stephen's side.
Stephen did not know what to think. If Ricketts had not addressed his companion as "Tony" he would have fancied he was one of the masters, he spoke with such an air of condescension. Stephen felt very uncomfortable, too, to hear what had been told him about Oliver. If he had not been told, he could not have believed his brother was anything but perfection.
"I'm lame, you see," said Pembury, presently. "You are quite sure you see? Look at my left leg."
"I see," said Stephen, blushing; "I--I hope it doesn't hurt."
"Only when I wash my face. But never mind that[,] Vulcan was lame too, but then he never washed. You know who Vulcan was, of course?"
"No, I don't think so," faltered Stephen, beginning to feel very uneasy and ignorant.
"Not know Vulcan! My eye! where have you been brought up? Then of course you don't know anything about the Tenth Fiji War? No? I thought not. Dreadful! We shall have to see what you do know. Come on."
Stephen entered Saint Dominic's thoroughly crestfallen, and fully convinced he was the most ignorant boy that ever entered a public school. The crowds of boys in the playground frightened him, and even the little boys inspired him with awe. They, at any rate, had heard of Vulcan, and knew about the Tenth Fiji War!
o--o--o
No more is said about Pembury's disability, though he's periodically depicted as walking lamely. It's a refreshing change from the sort of disability fiction I grew up on (and which, alas, still dominates), in which a character's disability is treated as the end-all of his existence.
*** 12 November 2009. Writing: The advantages of being blind, word-count-wise.
I just totted up my totals for 2001's wordage. Here's the totals for the months when I couldn't see print at all and (due to accompanying pain from my untreated dry eye) was largely bedridden.
February 2001: 50,700 words written (average 4225/day). Wrote 12 days.
March 2001: 46,320 words written (average 3563/day). Wrote 13 days.
April 2001: 65,830 words written (average 4389/day). Wrote 15 days.
Oh, man. It's almost enough to make me thrust pins in my eyes, a la Oedipus. (But not quite enough.)
My total for 2001 was 223,680 words written, which is more than in any other year I've recorded so far - this despite the fact that I got back Internet usage in May 2001, and my wordage practically disappeared after that. (I wrote on twenty more days last year than in 2001, but my average word count per day was lower.)
I still haven't calculated my wordage for what I've always considered my peak years: 1995, 1996, 2002, and 2003. I'll be interested to see how those years compare with 2001. At any rate, 2001 gives me a new record for words per day: 10,490 on April 8. I was working on Twenty Thousand Gold Stars that day.
*** 17 November 2009. Writing: Switching over to editing The Three Lands; plus, W. Somerset Maugham.
My Muse is continuing to throw me a crust or two from time, but at the moment, I'm devoting my primary energy to editing the three Three Lands novels that I'll be publishing next year. "Law Links" has to be readied for its beta readers, and I need to see whether "Law of Vengeance" and "Breached Boundaries" (which have been betaed already) need further betaing. I'd like to get all this done before I go online again.
Today I read some of W. Somerset Maugham's "On Human Bondage" (1915), which is supposedly a fictionalized autobiography. The schoolboy section - which was my motive for reading the novel - was so-so: stylistically polished, but otherwise no better than many other schoolboy stories I've read from authors who are considered to be lesser in quality. Perhaps the novel - which is supposed to be a classic - gets better later on; I gave up (temporarily, at least) at Chapter 41. By that point in the novel, the protagonist had cold-shouldered every boy at his school, made his adoring foster mother cry, failed to give any thanks to the headmaster who encouraged him in his studies, and abandoned a woman he'd slept with. Everywhere he goes, he's dissatisfied with the place he finds himself in; methinketh that the places he visits aren't the real problem.
*** 18 November 2009. Home: Fall leaves and gardening.
Doug and I had afight stirring debate over whether the leaves on our lawn should be raked this year.
Dusk's position: We should leave all the leaves where they are in hopes that they kill our wretched lawn.
Doug's position: We should treat the leaves exactly the way that all suburban leaves have been treated since prehistoric times. (Well, that's what his position sounded like to me.)
Our uneasy compromise - which was reached by us getting too tired to argue any more - is that only the leaves in the east side yard will be left on the ground. The grass is already dying in that part of our property, and the east side yard is hemmed in on three sides by buildings and bushes.
I've pledged to go out in fifty-degree-below-zero weather to rake the leaves back into place if the wind blows them away. (I suggested mulching the leaves with a lawnmower, but Doug is of the opinion that our lawnmower is too wimpy for such a job.)
The weather is actually pleasant at the moment (what my Southern apprentice would describe as "cold": about sixty degrees), so I'm spending an hour a day raking elsewhere in the yard. I could use the exercise.
I'll be interested to see what happens to the east side yard over the winter. I've never actually paid attention to what forests are like after a winter with leaves on the ground. I'm assuming that the moss - which is plentiful there, hurrah - will survive, and that the mushrooms there will continue to pop their little heads up. Also, I'm hoping that the evergreen sapling will survive. But what else will grow there after a leaf-protected winter?
*** 20 November 2009. Home: Switching over to writing The Eternal Dungeon; plus, The Beta Reader Problem.
I finished writing the lighthouse scene in "Master and Servant 3: Unmarked." It was horribly difficult to write and will require a major revision, but at least I've got that story out of the way. So far (I still have two and a half scenes to write), "Unmarked" is 61,000 words long - almost more of a novel than a novella. I'm calculating that the novel as a whole will be about 150,000 words long. Good thing that I didn't try to squeeze four novellas into that novel.
I'm setting aside "Master and Servant" for now in favor of my holiday gift fic. First, though, I'm going to take my monthly visit online. That will allow me to get started on the holiday story right after Thanksgiving.
Thanksgiving was when I started writing last year's holiday story. The 17,000-word novella took me a mere three days to write. Alas, I can't hope for that type of wordage this year; my Muse is being very sluggish. So I'm going to need to work on this year's novella every single day after Thanksgiving if I'm to finish it in time.
Ordinarily, I'd wait till I had all of my currently edited stories ready for the beta readers before going online. But I've reached the exalted stage where I can send out e-mail without checking incoming mail. So I'll e-mail later the stories to be betaed. I'd rather get my trip to the Web out of the way now, so that I can tend fully to my Muse between Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Meanwhile, it being fashionable to complain about The Servant Problem, I'm going to whine about The Beta Reader Problem.
I don't have enough beta readers to edit my Three Lands novels for this year. I may manage to scrape by in finding enough beta readers for "Master and Servant," but only by sending out a plea for help to a beta reader I haven't used for years.
In other words, I'm going to have to go on another hunt for beta readers, darn it. Finding good, reliable beta readers who can do more than proofread (you know who you are, and you know that I worship at your feet) is pretty much the worst literary problem I'm facing these days.
(Really, it's times like this when the M/s world looks so attractive. Just show me to the part of the M/s world where the beta reader slaves hang out.)
--C. Anne Gardner. Because, um, yeah.
For newcomers: Background to my writing entries | Background to my mentoring entries | Background to my simplicity entries | Background to my home entries.
How I reply to comments at this blog.
*** 8 November 2009. Writing: Wordage and my Internet addiction (a look at the past).
While skimming through my journals for entries on "Blood Brothers," I happened across an August 1980 entry that reported I'd written approximately 162,500 words in 1979.
By comparison, I wrote 193,140 words last year. These days, I'm a full-time writer with a computer. In 1979, I was a full-time student who wrote stories by hand.
The 1979 word count is impressive as heck. Coincidentally, last night I began doing the tedious but rewarding task of figuring out my wordage count for the 1995-2005 period (2006 being the year when I began keeping careful records of my daily wordage). This involves going back to the original drafts of my stories, checking the word count of each dated section, and recording the results separately.
Five hours of work yielded me the wordage for 1997-2000. I don't have any firm conclusions yet about whether my writing has declined in recent years, for my golden years of fiction-writing were 1995-1996 and 2002-2003. But I can see quite clearly the path of my Internet addiction, as reflected in the wordage. See for yourself; these are the number of days during which I wrote in each month.
December 1996: 12 days.
January 1997: 17 days.
February 1997: 14 days.
( February 1997 is when my Internet addiction began.)
March 1997: 0 days.
April 1997: 1 day.
May 1997: 0 days.
June 1997: 0 days.
July 1997: 0 days.
August 1997: 0 days.
September 1997: 0 days.
October 1997: 0 days.
November 1997: 0 days.
December 1997: 1 day.
January 1998: 1 day.
February 1998: 0 days.
March 1998: 0 days.
April 1998: 5 days.
May 1998: 1 day.
June 1998: 0 days.
July 1998: 0 days.
August 1998: 0 days.
September 1998: 3 days.
October 1998: 1 day.
November 1998: 0 days.
December 1998: 0 days.
January 1999: 1 day.
February 1999: 0 days.
March 1999: 1 days.
April 1999: 6 days.
May 1999: 1 day.
June 1999: 0 days.
July 1999: 0 days.
August 1999: 9 days.
(Beginning in August 1999, I evidently made an effort to pull myself away from the Internet.)
September 1999: 2 days.
October 1999: 6 days.
November 1999: 14 days.
December 1999: 3 days.
(In December, I let myself be persuaded to become Co-Webmaster of a flame-ridden discussion board that required 24-hour supervision. The Webmaster promptly absconded, leaving me holding the baby.</i>)
January 2000: 1 day.
February 2000: 0 days.
March 2000: 5 days.
(Notice that I keep having higher wordage counts around this time of the year. That's because I was giving up the Internet for Lent. Or trying to.)
April 2000: 0 days.
May 2000: 2 days.
June 2000: 0 days.
July 2000: 0 days.
August 2000: 9 days.
(In August, I quit as Co-Webmaster of the discussion board.)
September 2000: Wrote 1 day.
(And promptly volunteered to be a moderator.)
That's the end of my fiction-writing for 2000. In January 2001, I became partially sighted, and in January 2002 I discovered the glories of online fiction, which gave my Internet addiction a new form for a while.
Overall, I wrote 185,179 words between 1997 and 2000 - in other words, I wrote about as much in four years as I had written in 1979. But you know, the reason why I mentioned my previous year's word count in my August 1980 entry was because I also recorded my word count from January to August 1980.
Nine thousand words. Me slacking off is nothing new.
*** 11 November 2009. Writing: My ability to write descriptions.
It's becoming increasingly clear that my inability to write descriptions is due to the fact that I simply haven't paid attention to my surroundings for forty-six years. It's also becoming increasingly clear that this is clogging the arteries of my fiction-writing.
The two things that have made this clear is my visit to Hoopers Island and my visit to Riversdale Mansion (the latter of which I'll write about separately, next time). In both cases I came home and wrote scenes with relative ease. I say "relative" because, even in these cases where I was carefully scrutinizing my surroundings with the aim of writing about them, I found that I couldn't remember much about my surroundings afterwards.
There's a game you play as a child (or you do you have a decent education - or, in my case, a decent public library): You scrutinize a picture, memorizing everything you see in it, and then try to remember what was in the scene. It's presented as a game to children, but it's really an exercise to check children's ability to see and remember.
It's a game I find I'm returning to. I've been reading picture books for the last month - simply because their large print is the only type of print I can read at this time of year without hurting my eyes - and, while a lot of the illustrations are unmemorable, there are some that I found myself scrutinizing with great care. And the longer I scrutinized them, the more that I realized how little I see of a scene on first look . . . or second . . . or third . . . or tenth . . .
I think continuing to scrutinize artwork closely will help improve my powers of observation. But I need to do more exercises along those lines, because it's my inability to be able to imagine the sensory aspects of a scene that makes it so difficult for me to write down the stories in my head.
*** 11 November 2009. Simplicity: And the computer file purge continues.
I was down to less than a gigabyte of space on my hard drive, so tonight I did what I should have done a while back: I did a Windows search on my hard drive for all files above 10 megabyte, then started with the biggest files and purged everything that I no longer needed (or never did need) or that was a duplicate of something I had elsewhere on my hard drive.
I simply skimmed the list, and am only one-fifth of the way through it, but I've already cleared out a gigabyte and a half. The big problem really is with my research material for the 1960s/retrofuture portion of Prison City. A lot of that takes the form of videos or large images. All told, I have nearly six megabytes' worth of material awaiting me. And I can't view or delete any of that before next summer.
I really need extra storage space for ephemeral research material. My apprentice has his eye out for a cheap DVD writer for me, but he hasn't turned up anything yet.
In the meantime, this sort of purging is a good lesson in slimming down, even if it's frustrating that the files I least want to keep usually turn out to be 15 kilobytes in size, while the ones I most want to keep are half a gigabyte.
*** 11 November 2009. Writing: More schoolboy fiction.
I just finished reading "Fifth Form at St. Dominic's" (1887), by Talbot Baines Reed, whose sole crime, in the eyes of literary critics, seems to be that he was popular. As Frank Eyre dryly puts it, Reed brought school fiction "to a perfection of unreality that later writers could only copy."
I found the novel entertaining. Its theme wasn't deep ("Don't cheat"), but the plot was fast-paced, and the characters all had distinct personalities.
I was particularly taken with Pembury, the ironic editor of the fifth-form newspaper. Here he is, taking advantage of the ignorance of a new boy.
"Here, Tony," suddenly shouted Ricketts to Pembury, who was jogging along on his crutches a little way ahead, towards the school; "do you mind showing this kid the way up? I have to go back with Wren. There's a good fellow."
"Well, that's cool," replied Master Pembury; "I'm not a kid-conductor! Come on, youngster; I suppose you haven't got a name, have you?"
"Yes, Stephen Greenfield."
"Oh, brother of our dear friend Oliver; I hope you'll turn out a better boy than him, he's a shocking character."
Stephen looked concerned. "I'm sure he doesn't mean to do what's wrong," began he, apologetically.
"That's just it, my boy. If he doesn't mean to do it, why on earth does he do it? I shall be sorry if he's expelled, very sorry. But come on; don't mind if I walk too fast," added he, hobbling along by Stephen's side.
Stephen did not know what to think. If Ricketts had not addressed his companion as "Tony" he would have fancied he was one of the masters, he spoke with such an air of condescension. Stephen felt very uncomfortable, too, to hear what had been told him about Oliver. If he had not been told, he could not have believed his brother was anything but perfection.
"I'm lame, you see," said Pembury, presently. "You are quite sure you see? Look at my left leg."
"I see," said Stephen, blushing; "I--I hope it doesn't hurt."
"Only when I wash my face. But never mind that[,] Vulcan was lame too, but then he never washed. You know who Vulcan was, of course?"
"No, I don't think so," faltered Stephen, beginning to feel very uneasy and ignorant.
"Not know Vulcan! My eye! where have you been brought up? Then of course you don't know anything about the Tenth Fiji War? No? I thought not. Dreadful! We shall have to see what you do know. Come on."
Stephen entered Saint Dominic's thoroughly crestfallen, and fully convinced he was the most ignorant boy that ever entered a public school. The crowds of boys in the playground frightened him, and even the little boys inspired him with awe. They, at any rate, had heard of Vulcan, and knew about the Tenth Fiji War!
No more is said about Pembury's disability, though he's periodically depicted as walking lamely. It's a refreshing change from the sort of disability fiction I grew up on (and which, alas, still dominates), in which a character's disability is treated as the end-all of his existence.
*** 12 November 2009. Writing: The advantages of being blind, word-count-wise.
I just totted up my totals for 2001's wordage. Here's the totals for the months when I couldn't see print at all and (due to accompanying pain from my untreated dry eye) was largely bedridden.
February 2001: 50,700 words written (average 4225/day). Wrote 12 days.
March 2001: 46,320 words written (average 3563/day). Wrote 13 days.
April 2001: 65,830 words written (average 4389/day). Wrote 15 days.
Oh, man. It's almost enough to make me thrust pins in my eyes, a la Oedipus. (But not quite enough.)
My total for 2001 was 223,680 words written, which is more than in any other year I've recorded so far - this despite the fact that I got back Internet usage in May 2001, and my wordage practically disappeared after that. (I wrote on twenty more days last year than in 2001, but my average word count per day was lower.)
I still haven't calculated my wordage for what I've always considered my peak years: 1995, 1996, 2002, and 2003. I'll be interested to see how those years compare with 2001. At any rate, 2001 gives me a new record for words per day: 10,490 on April 8. I was working on Twenty Thousand Gold Stars that day.
*** 17 November 2009. Writing: Switching over to editing The Three Lands; plus, W. Somerset Maugham.
My Muse is continuing to throw me a crust or two from time, but at the moment, I'm devoting my primary energy to editing the three Three Lands novels that I'll be publishing next year. "Law Links" has to be readied for its beta readers, and I need to see whether "Law of Vengeance" and "Breached Boundaries" (which have been betaed already) need further betaing. I'd like to get all this done before I go online again.
Today I read some of W. Somerset Maugham's "On Human Bondage" (1915), which is supposedly a fictionalized autobiography. The schoolboy section - which was my motive for reading the novel - was so-so: stylistically polished, but otherwise no better than many other schoolboy stories I've read from authors who are considered to be lesser in quality. Perhaps the novel - which is supposed to be a classic - gets better later on; I gave up (temporarily, at least) at Chapter 41. By that point in the novel, the protagonist had cold-shouldered every boy at his school, made his adoring foster mother cry, failed to give any thanks to the headmaster who encouraged him in his studies, and abandoned a woman he'd slept with. Everywhere he goes, he's dissatisfied with the place he finds himself in; methinketh that the places he visits aren't the real problem.
*** 18 November 2009. Home: Fall leaves and gardening.
Doug and I had a
Dusk's position: We should leave all the leaves where they are in hopes that they kill our wretched lawn.
Doug's position: We should treat the leaves exactly the way that all suburban leaves have been treated since prehistoric times. (Well, that's what his position sounded like to me.)
Our uneasy compromise - which was reached by us getting too tired to argue any more - is that only the leaves in the east side yard will be left on the ground. The grass is already dying in that part of our property, and the east side yard is hemmed in on three sides by buildings and bushes.
I've pledged to go out in fifty-degree-below-zero weather to rake the leaves back into place if the wind blows them away. (I suggested mulching the leaves with a lawnmower, but Doug is of the opinion that our lawnmower is too wimpy for such a job.)
The weather is actually pleasant at the moment (what my Southern apprentice would describe as "cold": about sixty degrees), so I'm spending an hour a day raking elsewhere in the yard. I could use the exercise.
I'll be interested to see what happens to the east side yard over the winter. I've never actually paid attention to what forests are like after a winter with leaves on the ground. I'm assuming that the moss - which is plentiful there, hurrah - will survive, and that the mushrooms there will continue to pop their little heads up. Also, I'm hoping that the evergreen sapling will survive. But what else will grow there after a leaf-protected winter?
*** 20 November 2009. Home: Switching over to writing The Eternal Dungeon; plus, The Beta Reader Problem.
I finished writing the lighthouse scene in "Master and Servant 3: Unmarked." It was horribly difficult to write and will require a major revision, but at least I've got that story out of the way. So far (I still have two and a half scenes to write), "Unmarked" is 61,000 words long - almost more of a novel than a novella. I'm calculating that the novel as a whole will be about 150,000 words long. Good thing that I didn't try to squeeze four novellas into that novel.
I'm setting aside "Master and Servant" for now in favor of my holiday gift fic. First, though, I'm going to take my monthly visit online. That will allow me to get started on the holiday story right after Thanksgiving.
Thanksgiving was when I started writing last year's holiday story. The 17,000-word novella took me a mere three days to write. Alas, I can't hope for that type of wordage this year; my Muse is being very sluggish. So I'm going to need to work on this year's novella every single day after Thanksgiving if I'm to finish it in time.
Ordinarily, I'd wait till I had all of my currently edited stories ready for the beta readers before going online. But I've reached the exalted stage where I can send out e-mail without checking incoming mail. So I'll e-mail later the stories to be betaed. I'd rather get my trip to the Web out of the way now, so that I can tend fully to my Muse between Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Meanwhile, it being fashionable to complain about The Servant Problem, I'm going to whine about The Beta Reader Problem.
I don't have enough beta readers to edit my Three Lands novels for this year. I may manage to scrape by in finding enough beta readers for "Master and Servant," but only by sending out a plea for help to a beta reader I haven't used for years.
In other words, I'm going to have to go on another hunt for beta readers, darn it. Finding good, reliable beta readers who can do more than proofread (you know who you are, and you know that I worship at your feet) is pretty much the worst literary problem I'm facing these days.
(Really, it's times like this when the M/s world looks so attractive. Just show me to the part of the M/s world where the beta reader slaves hang out.)
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