November 2007 Archives

Today was the final day for the Queen Anne house, one year after the horrendous November that ended the boat adventure and culminated with three inches of snow and ice.

Nature was slightly better behaved tonight, and bid a fond adieu while I wrapped up the cleaning.

Jasper's current most popular hang-out... directly above the heat vent (and since it's been about 60 in the mornings here lately, who can blame him?)

Here's the first piece of video that was ever filmed with the new (well, new at the time) digital video camera. Clementine was a stray from the Seattle Animal Shelter who didn't quite understand that she was a rabbit, and Delia-- well, Delia hates everything except humans... and her catnip goldfish. This video was taken in winter 2004, and originally pieced together by me to test out how to do video processing on a computer. What's more remarkable is that it was done on my ancient little laptop!

This may have already been posted, but I needed to do some testing with the move to a new webhost and this image was handy when I was trying out the upload feature.

It's remarkable how much easier it seems to get my word count up when writing dialog instead of establishing scenes. Although today was mostly spent on moving web stuff to the new host I did manage to hit my quota, and the tally is now up to 21,100. Still ahead of pace and it's always good to hit milestones like 20K.

Another tough day today, though I managed to hammer out about 1800 words to bring my total to 19,300.

I spent a lot of the day migrating sites over to the new host and upgrading there to Movable Type 4, which screws up a bunch of style work I'd done on these sites so there's a bit more work to do there, although once they're in MT4 that system has a lot more administrative features so it'll be good... there's probably a metaphor there to trying to get through these touch middle sections of the novel in order to reach the good end points. Hmm...

No more monkeys today, either. If anyone has any requests put them in the comments and I'll see what i can incorporate. And remember, "be nice to me or I'll put you in my novel."

The dissertation defense is finally scheduled.

Anyone in town on Monday, December 3rd at 2:00 pm is cordially invited to room S-060 in the William H. Foege Building on the UW Campus to watch me give my approximately one hour presentation on what I've spent the past six-plus years working on.

That's right -- through the amazing power of science we've managed to compress roughly 12,000 work hours into a single hour.

It figures that a concept gets mentioned and it lurks in the subconscious waiting to creep back out. So today's writing featured a cameo by a monkey -- well not so much a cameo but a discussion about some monkeys. Amusingly it led to a fairly productive day and led to a plot breakthrough, and I hammered out nearly three thousand more words, bringing my tally to 17,500 to round out week one, or an average of 2500 words per day.

I did just under 2000 words today, reaching just over 14,500 words down. I was hoping to get to 15K but ran out of time as midnight approached. I bit the bullet and sped up the plot a bit today, jumping two weeks in the story after I realized that there were going to be a lot of boring and repetitive days otherwise. My rapid start has quickly fizzled and I'm now only two days ahead of the pace.

Kristin suggested I check out the forums should things start to bog down since they apparently often have silly challenges and suggestions, so if monkeys come into play at some point around the 22000 word mark, you can assume that I took that advice.

So get out there and vote, while you still have the right to do so.

Busy day today -- on campus for most of the day and then a trip down to SeaTac this evening to give a friend a ride and then meet my dad, who arrived in town today for a business trip, for a late dinner.

I only managed to put down about 1075 words today, but that puts me at the one-quarter point. If I were doing this at the official pace (1667 words per day) this would be early in week two, which is supposedly where things bog down for most people and they start cursing their plots, their characters, and most other things about life, so I guess in that regard I'm on pace...

I'm strongly considering a dramatic plot shift which would provide an infusion of action to the story, which seems to be bogging down now with my initial outline. I think the problem was that I had a good idea of the basic premise, the protagonist, the conflict and the ultimate end point, but I didn't do much to consider how to build compelling connections between them. Having a plot idea to start probably was fine, but maybe I shouldn't have worried to much about having an ending. We'll see if the ending stays or if it gets tossed.

Of course there's also the entire aspect of being stuck in science writing for so long, where brevity is critical and word/letter counts are maximum rather than minimum goals. Literary form goes by the wayside when you're forced into parallel construction and constant active voice.

Unsurprisingly, given yesterday's tally, today marked me hitting 10,000 words typed. Final tally for the day was 11,505, which puts me just over 23% to the goal.

At this point I'm struggling a bit with advancing the plot. I know the general direction where I want to take the story, but getting there is proving to be a challenge, mostly because the shortest distance to that point would take far too little time and too few words. Although at this point I'm not worried about missing the word count goal, I'd still like the story to actually conclude in a timely manner and not turn into a boring epic tome... though that's what revisions and rewrites are for.

Oops, forgot to update the word count yesterday. As of midnight last night, 7850 words, and tonight now up to 9370 words. Today's the first day I didn't meet the 1667 word quota, although I've got a bit of a cushion. Mostly today was busy with running around doing errands, and tomorrow looks to be more of the same, but the 20% mark is very close.

We'll see if the plot keeps up -- so far it's shifted a few times to head-off what I feared would turn into some very dull days downstream, but only time will tell if that was a good idea.

11:58 pm update: Well, that little bit about not hitting my quota was sufficient to shame me into doing a bit more writing (and finishing the chapter, which puts me back on pace as far as those go), so the tally is now 9800 words. (Well, nearly that many. MS Word counts some extra things like chapter titles and section dividers as words, so it's probably closer to 9780 words.)

Dulcie and Carmela were less than two days from being transfered to another foster home in preparation for me moving, when I received news that a couple was interested in the cats. They came over this morning to meet them, the cats did everything that I trained them to do, and sure enough it was love at first sight.

This evening they're probably hiding under some new furniture, but the important thing is they found a new home together where they'll get lots of attention, and not a minute too soon.

That's now nine fosters in the door, nine fosters successfully out the door, and now an indefinite hiatus.

Well, so far so good. I'm well ahead of the curve -- I need to average 1667 words per day to hit the goal of 50K by 11:59 pm on November 30th.

Of course the early days are probably going to be the easiest, since it's like starting to to paint a floor -- there's no concern about where you start or how heavy to lay it on... it's on about day ten that you realize you painted yourself into a corner, and by then there's no going back. (Of course, if it takes you ten continuous days to paint a floor there's another issue there, but I digress.) I hope that the way I set up my general plot will help protect me from that, but only time will tell.

Meanwhile I'm going to be moving all my sites over to a real host over the next few days because my poor home server will be stuck in the midst of house moving, and frankly it's starting to get overwhelmed with the amount of things I'd like to do with it, such as the streaming video.