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http://www.the-leaky-cauldron.org/2009/11/29/wb-lowers-price-of-harry-potter-spells-application-for-iphone-plus-new-contest

WB has now lowered the price of their new Harry Potter Spells application for iPhone and iPod Touch to $2.99 (down from $4.99) At the official site, you can learn more about this fun game application tranforms your iPhone into a wand where you can duel and cast 14 different spells, and you can see a helpful training video here in our galleries. You can purchase the application here at iTunes.  ...

The season changing--- the day after Thanksgiving pouring rain, winds; higher winds Saturday, snow north, power outages, downed trees in many areas. Cold today. Hope Kym and all of hers are snug and warm up north.
Harvest altar cloths, tablecloths, towels, mitts, etc all off and being washed and dried to put away; Yule ones on.
Only one wineglass broke on Thanksgiving. I say "only" because some holidays have seen multiple ones bite the dust.
I'm 62 now. Doesn't seem possible.

I'm pleased as punch that the pecan brittle I offered for rowangolightly's auction has raised as much money as the afghan I offered for apocalypticbob's, which I still haven't finished. Same money for far less labor on my part. That's a win!

At any rate, the bidding on the brittle ends tomorrow at 11:59 p.m. Just a reminder.

I contemplated taking TBRE and The Jeff up on an offer to go hiking today, and decided that what I really needed was a people-free day in which to be productive.  So I'm here on the couch with the dog, about to get cracking on "The Unicorn Evils" again.

It's nice to be eager to work on something, and to have lots of ideas for it.

Tea today: green jasmine

Teacup today: green Japanese

Time to get to work.

Er, ok, who was it who was waxing lyrical over the joys of bread machines in face of my rather stubborn desire to not use one?

Feel free to do the smug "told you so" thing.

::giggle::

Oven is still on blink, I wanted bread to have with my cheese and paté for dinner last night, a lightbulb slowly appeared over my head (bit dull and flickery, like) to the effect that we have a bread making machine, and the packet mix says "can be used in a machine or by hand".

Oooh (with rising inflection)

So I did. Well, mum did, I was pretty shaky after lunch and poring over the various bits of paper to do with the bread machine, which didn't actually include the instructions, but from looking at the other recipes it seems you put the liquid in first, then the dry stuff, and the packet said rapid or normal. Except by the time we'd got the maker out and given it a wipe over and were ready to start it would have been gone midnight on the normal setting, so mum suggested the rapid one and set it all up for me.

One hour later, it beeped and I took the pan out of the machine.
Ten minutes after that, I tipped the cooling bread out of the pan onto the cooling rack.
Five minutes after that, being impatient, I was slicing nice warm slightly squidgy bread and slathering it with tasty things.

Utter heaven. Ten times better than doing it by hand, in terms of the taste and texture and also ease of use - kneading bread is fun but it fair knackers me after just the two required minutes, and then waiting for it to rise and... No. I shall embrace the wonders of technology.

Must buy more bread mix.

Oh, and I've the rest of the loaf to munch on for lunch today too, slurp :)

George Gissing, in The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, his bitter novel about a reclusive and mostly failed writer:

And why should any man who writes, even if he write things immortal, nurse anger at the world's neglect? Who asked him to publish? Who promised him a hearing? Who has broken faith with him? If my shoemaker turn me out an excellent pair of boots and I, in some mood of cantankerous unreason, throw them back upon his hands, the man has just cause of complaint. But your poem, your novel, who bargained with you for it?

I wouldn't want to give you the impression that I dredge these quotes up from my wide & deep reading in World Literature; mostly I find them quoted by other, more learned persons, usually in journals. This one appears in the new NYRB in an article about Michael Greenberg by Jay Neugeboren (hello, Jay).

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As the great sort-out continues, I notice that I have a library bound score of Britten's "A Ceremony of Carols" among the many many pieces of musick piled hereabouts.

Now, since the piece above is for treble voices and harp, I can't see any circumstances in which I will be using said score. Is there anyone out there, especially now that Advert Advent is on us, that could use such a copy - free, gratis and for nothing in perpetuity?

Collection to be arranged at our mutual convenience.

If you feel that some sort of writing software might help you as a writer and don't want to pay £££, you might like to know that this has just popped up. Yes, I know NaNoWriMo is almost over, the timing could have been better, but there it is, and I offer the link for what it's worth (no hurry; FDAD doesn't have a time limit).

Personally, I view writing software rather like occult jewellery and such--it's stupid to think that it will do the job for you, but it's just as stupid to dismiss it as rubbish purely because you are so intellectually disciplined and brilliant that you can write a bestseller first draft on the backs of old envelopes in the dark. If it helps, if it makes you feel you can do it more easily, then by all means use it, and the Weatherwaxes of the world can go stuff themselves.

Well, I did it. The rough draft of Clockwork Dragon isn't finished; there's some holes that need filling (with little red notes in the text so I don't forger) and some research to do still, and the climax and denouement to write, and maybe a prologue too, since I'm starting to think that the very short prologue is really the start of a different story--but I have more than 50,000 words that I'm happy with, as first drafts go. And I did it all in November. It feels good.

I wasn't about to follow the conventional NaNo advice that "all first drafts are crap, so all that matters is typing as fast as you can". So if I hadn't "won", I wouldn't be crying. But it feels good that I did reach this goal, and with enough time to spare that I didn't have to worry about weird inconsistencies, like the NaNo website changing the date on me at 11 p.m. instead of midnight, and the NaNo website counting my text at more than 300 fewer words than my word processor counted.

Some days I spent more time on Google than on writing new words. Or asking people things. Trying to imagine clearly how stuff I've never done looks and feels, trying to gauge what a character would find when locked in a long-abandoned spot, to try to use to escape, and reasonable outcomes for those attempts--and whether some of the attempts might prove more lethal than the plot calls for (and what to do about that).

Other times I leapt forward, skipping whole chapters when I wasn't sure what needs to happen for the plot to move forward, and going to crisis points, critical events that I knew had to happen. I found that less uncomfortable than I thought it would be.

And I reached the goal, even after deciding to go with the hardest of three potential projects. So it feels good!

Next, I think I'll spend a little time filling in the holes in the worldbuilding, and go through and make sure that the chapters are in the correct order for the timeline issues that getting the chapters actually written revealed. I'm not going to stop writing new words, but I think they'll flow better with some of this other stuff resolved.

And, of course, I want to catch up on other writing projects. The snakeskin story is my first goal; I also promised to do a 12-drummers story which is due in early December. And I want to finish the sparkly sea-serpent story too. And then there's that story I decided really was a narrative first draft of a short story, rather than a piece of flash fiction. And Fireborn, I can't forget that!

I want to organize my thoughts, what I've learned from NaNo so far, but for now--

Thanks to Vue and Poser, I have finally managed to construct a version of an album cover idea that's been bugging me for the past thirty years. Seriously.

It's not right, of course--the hair's wrong, the pose isn't quite what I wanted, and so on--but at least it's out there now and I can let go of the damn thing.

*brain falls apart*

Sunday morning started for me at around half three. The Chinese from last night was loaded with MSG and the varnish-like flavour enhancer and I do not get on. I lay under the kitchen tap for a while, drinking cold Thames Water to try and rehydrate my head[1]. No matter how much I drank, I would need more water in a few minutes. By the time I had managed to flush away the last of the MSG, Tinkerbell and Marlowe (The Cats) were ready for some attention. Whilst Tinkerbell is happy with simply climbing on top of me and purring loudly. Marlowe takes a hard-boiled approach and will reach under the duvet, hook a hand with his claw and pull it out and put it down on his head for a stroke. Whilst I adore the ability of the cats to communicate with me, I do not adore a 4am demand for attention.

So I am sitting here, clutching a mug of coffee for fear of falling and switching between writing projects. I've started a really fundamental re-write of Saying Goodbye to Amy[2] (SGTA). So much so that I have written a new character, introduced a new character who will need to be woven in to the main story, and planned some changes to the story that will make it a lot darker; however I also think these changes will turn it from a 'story' into a novel. I've also made two really big decisions. One is that it is a fantasy novel, and no matter how much I try to wriggle out of it, The Story will be happier if I acknowledge that it is a portal fantasy and let it abide by the rules of the form. The second is that as much as I love the working title of "Saying Goodbye to Amy", that is not what the piece is about any more and I need to move on.

Like naming a band, or a pet, naming a novel can take longer than writing the whole thing in the first place. I've got "Wychwood End" as a title in my head, and yet it doesn't seem to belong to this story; There is "Fiddle Man", but I don't feel right, naming the piece after the antagonist; The Fantasy Novel Title Generator was quite serendipitous when it gave me "The stringed Princess", (but less so with "Twilight's Chaos"). I guess "Wychwood" might work? However, these things are less important than the actual editing and re-writing - there will be plenty of time for being precious about what it is going to be called when it is finished.

In another window I have my college piece open. We're looking at prolepsis this week. The first piece I wrote, which actually belongs to SGTA, has a flashback rather than a flashforwards and so I am experimenting with something else which I have lifted from an earlier piece and tweaked.

In yet another window I have a copy of Final Draft open. I do not know how it works.

                                                             FADE IN:



               INT. CLOCK-MAKER'S WORKSHOP - NIGHT TIME

               The workshop looks like a Rebrandt painting.  Most of it is
               in shadow.  The workbench is lit by a gas lamp.  There are
               ordered tools on velvet rolls either side, but in the
               middle a jumble of tiny cogs and springs and screws.

               The CLOCK-MAKER, the sort of old man who makes people smile,
               reaches for a strange pair of spectacles.  They have lenses
               in front of the lenses which can flip up and down for close
               work.  He puts them on and then reaches for a miniature screwdriver.


                                   CLOCKMAKER (SINGING)
                         Silent Night
                         Holy Night
                         All is Calm
                         All is --


               There is sudden movement from the pile of cogs in front of
               him.  A mouse, about the size of the "tube mice" who live
               on the London Underground, runs out from under the pile,
               scattering the cogs everywhere.


                         Clockmaker (JUMPING) 
                         Oh goodness!

* * *

I am going to have another coffee, and a shower, and then see if I can't trick my battered body into thinking it has had a full night's sleep in the last week by repeating the exercise again.


[1] The rest of me was fine, just my head and brain were dessicated
[2] I wrote the first draft of Saying Goodbye to Amy in a week in February of 2005. I have been re-writing it ever since. (Even though I have thought it was finished, it keeps surprising me)

In case any of my local friends are interested, my favorite bookstore in San Francisco, Borderlands Books, is opening a cafe and is in need of part-time help.

From an email I got this evening:

As you may have seen in the last newsletter, the cafe next door to the bookstore is almost ready to open. Our first day of business is going to be the 18th of December. And that means we need to hire some people. A few people in fact. And, I don't know a group of people that I'd be happier hiring and working with than our customers.

If you think you'd like to work with me at the cafe, please send me a resume as soon as you can. We're going to be doing interviews Wednesday and Thursday this week as well as some next week.

Here are some key things you should know --
1) I don't care if you have any experience or not.
2) The pay is just as crappy as you'd expect but it should be a fun place to work and there's a nice discount at the store that goes along with the job.
3) Hours are flexible but, at the outset, I'd expect you to work at least three days a week. And, there is room in the schedule for full-time (or at least near-full time) positions.

Jude is going to be helping me out with reviewing resumes and scheduling interviews so you'll probably hear from her at the outset of the process.

Finally, if any of your friends would be interested, please pass this information along to them. If you're a customer of ours, you probably have a pretty good idea what sort of people would fit in well with the odd and eclectic crew that works here.

Thanks and I hope you have a very happy and calm holiday season.

Warm Regards,
Alan Beatts
Owner

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