Tag: novels

Incremental progress…

…is still progress. When it comes to writing, I’ll take it. I have a first chapter draft finally, after several false starts. This has been my accompaniment.


Lou Reed, New York and Walk On The Wild Side, The Best of Lou Reed.


And this two-song “CD Single” of The Rembrandts. The back side might remind you who they are if you were alive in the Nineties and have forgotten.


Yup, the theme song from the TV show “Friends,” or “I’ll Be There For You.” I think I got this to use on a video we made for the place I worked from ’92 to ’96. Memories…

Then I moved on to these.

R.E.M.: Murmur; Out Of Time; Automatic For The People; and Monster.

There’ll be more R.E.M. to come before I continue in the “R” section of my CD binders. None of this music has been really connected to what I’m writing (except that this novel does begin with a sort of who’s who among a group of friends, I guess).

Different time, completely different kind of music. That’s fine. I’m a little partial to “Nightswimming” from Automatic For The People because if I recall correctly, Timothy referenced it in Three Fortunes in One Cookie. THERE’S a blast from the past.

Button Sunday

This is why it takes me so long. Some writers power through to get it all down and then go back and do their edits. Occasionally I want to try it that way, but it never works for me.

Maybe I’m too trained as an editor and proofreader. I edit, read, re-edit, and re-read constantly as I go. Maybe it’s also my experience as a teacher trained to correct errors and suggest how to polish writing.

I learned the hard way this is why beta readers don’t work for me. By the time I send pages, I’ve already started altering them.

ETA: Most recent writing playlist.


Bonnie Raitt, Bonnie Raitt


Red Hot Chili Peppers: Blood Sugar Sex Magik; One Hot Minute

Los Angeles is the major city featured in the Neverending Saga. It’s the home of my soul even if it’s never been a physical home to me. Tom and I have explored there. Jim has been my tour guide there. From Blood Sugar Sex Magik, “City of Angels.” I’ve been able to use so much of L.A. in the Neverending Saga.

King of the Acorns

We’ve had an abundance of acorns this autumn, and no matter how many times we’ve swept or raked them and disposed of them, they’ve been replenished. Folklore has it that excessive acorns mean a hard winter* (an indicator that animals will be well fed during unusually long or intense cold seasons). Folklore is rarely dependable in today’s climate studies.

Still, I dubbed Rocky “King of the Acorns” today at his annual wreathing.

*I used this factoid in one of the novels in the Neverending Saga after a conversation with Lynne.

ETA: Later, after Tom and Debby returned from running errands, Tom took me outside to see what Timothy had done earlier in the day. He’s been working on cleaning and pruning the front yard, and he wanted to try some plants/herbs in Rocky’s flower bed, where they can get more light. Thanks, Tim!

And Tom has put the Christmas wreaths in the windows, including two in the windows of Lynne’s room.

And four in the living room windows. They now have little plaid reindeer on them.

random hump day post

Managing a day when Mercury goes into retrograde…

When I woke up and was about to take a shower, I noticed for who-knows-how-many times that a button was missing off my pajama pants. (I have a tendency to call procrastination “don’t sweat the small stuff.”) This time, I did something about it before my shower.

I found this coloring book recently, and as it was within my sight, I looked through it.

Most of the pages are pretty detailed, and this one appealed to me. It makes me think of my fictional Texas town, Coventry.

Then I was all NO! You need to get ready to write. So I grabbed the yellow book that has all the notes for the first chapters of the seventh book. And that’s the CD I ordered and will be listening to next of various artists performing John Prine’s songs.

I had to make a decision. Start writing, in which I would get lost for the day and into the night, or do some of the holiday things that need to be done soon (mostly mailing things out).

I spent a few hours in the kitchen pre-cooking tonight’s dinner and prepping the dough for cheese straws, some of which will be shipped.

Little dough balls for the cheese straws for Tom later to season with pepper and form into larger dough balls for pressing through the cookie presser.

They look like this pre-baked.

And then like this.

Sometime during the day I ran a shopping errand and an impulse item I grabbed was this little metal tray.

So that I could make the dining room table more festive and NOT a catchall place for the stuff I’m trying to get done.

I filled the tray with unshelled pecans, and I usually put those with Hersheys Miniatures as a snack for anyone who’ll sit with me and shell pecans. Since I had no Miniatures, I dropped in Kisses. (Shelling pecans is a zen activity in that it relaxes me and makes me reminisce about good times when I was growing up.)

There are picks and nutcrackers in that cup. That beautiful maple bowl is one made by Tom’s father and gifted to us. The table runner is a gift from Lynne (the reverse side has a fall theme).


Added an older dish to the other end of the table.

For the time being, it has the favorite candies of Tom, Tim, and Debby in it. This will change at Christmas.

Throughout the day, I worked on addressing Christmas cards. I’ve been sending them out in groups every other day. Now I have a few more and a package ready to go out, as well as contents for seven packages that I’ll box and ship tomorrow.

And…no writing got done, but a lot of other things did, and we had a good home-cooked meal, so it was time well spent.

Hump Day

Wednesday, and the writing is slow, but it is happening. This has been the writing playlist.


Prince: Purple Rain; 1999; and The Very Best of Prince.

And one of my favorite songwriters of always.

John Prine: John Prine and The Missing Years. The third CD, Broken Hearts and Dirty Windows: Songs of John Prine, Vol. 2, is a tribute compilation with other artists singing his songs. Because he died at the very beginning of the pandemic in 2020, they couldn’t gather and reminisce and mourn him as they wanted. So they did this instead.

“I Remember Everything” – Brandi Carlile
“Pretty Good” – Nathaniel Rateliff
“Saddle in the Rain” – Amanda Shires
“Yes I Guess They Oughta Name A Drink After You” – Tyler Childers
“Sweet Revenge” – Margo Price
“Summer’s End” – Valerie June
“Souvenirs” – Jason Isbell
“Angel from Montgomery” – Bonnie Raitt
“Sam Stone” – John Paul White
“One Red Rose” – Iris DeMent
“Hello in There” – Emmylou Harris
“Paradise” – Sturgill Simpson

And looking at this, I realized it’s Vol 2, so now I’ve ordered Vol 1 to add to my collection. Overall, I just need more of John Prine’s music. It’s on my list.

I first heard that song on an 8-track tape belonging to my college roommate Debbie, though it came out before we were in college. The artist was Bette Midler; the album, The Divine Miss M. Made me sad the first time I heard it and still makes me sad.

Tiny Tuesday!

Tim cracks me up. I was in a text exchange with him and Jim this morning, and I shared this.

And Tim quickly replied:

Then he amended that isn’t always true of K-POP bands, which reminded me that I have Mattel’s Jimin doll from the K-POP band BTS (standing for the Korean phrase Bangtan Sonyeondan, which in English translates to “bullet-resistant boy scouts.”)

Jimin is another of the dolls that represents a character in the Neverending Saga. In 2021, Wardrobe was called in to redo his look to match his character.

The character is a private investigator.

Back to wardrobe! If the Jimin character gets a kilt, that’ll bring the number to seven, same as in BTS, and the shunned doll can rejoin his friends.

This is not faithful to canon, meaning Tim has inadvertently created the first fan fiction for the characters in the Neverending Saga. WITHOUT EVEN READING IT. It’s magic!

I should give props to the band in case you’ve never heard them.

Now I’ll keep thinking of this group of dolls as the Bangtan Scots, which kind of fits, though to my knowledge, only one of the characters is of Scottish descent.

Saturday vibe

Tom cleared the space where the Christmas tree will go and brought it in from the Lean To.

When I left to run an errand (also Christmas related–picked up the stationery and envelopes for the 2023 Christmas letter), he’d started putting on the lower branches. When I got back–voila!

He paused before stringing the lights to watch the Alabama-Georgia game, which I’ve been trying not to hear–except I have the score updating on my phone, and it looks like Alabama just gave Georgia their first loss in two years. That’s the extent of football chat here on An Aries (Who Knows Some Stuff). I’d pulled up my manuscript to work on while cooking dinner, but my mind is very much elsewhere, so instead I wrote a poem.


I used a prompt from my Write The Poem book, but only used one of the suggested words because I drew words from my WoodWords set (made by the same company who’s brought us Magnetic Poetry for all these years). I think I was true to the spirit of the prompt, however.


 

Here’s the poem.

Now hoping to work on the novel. I’ll add my writing music playlist later.