The WAL

Earth Day happened on a Tuesday this year. Not exactly workable in my job situation, but thankfully I’m taking a few days of vacation beginning the day before yesterday, so I’ve got the weekend off for post Earth Day weekend festivities, i.e. clean up. With swimming lessons and a pair of birthday parties yesterday (Saturday), we elected to participate today, volounteering to fill some bags full of trash and recylcables at the “Fair Grounds”, a large green space in our town which includes a playground, an 800 metre track, the old arena, and a large pen sometimes used for riding exhibitions and the occasional demolition derby. Dragging the kids along, we set out to do a little extra for Mother Earth just after lunch. Two hours later, every bag was full and more. Along with the standard plastic bags and bottles, soda cans, beer bottles, cast off newspapers, and miscellaneous wrappers, chip bags and other trash, we found a number of less expected items and I thought I’d share.

• A tire
• A pair of size 8 soccer cleats
• The metal ladder from the back of a camper van
• A muffler
• Interior lighting from a car dating back to the late 70s
• A laundry basket with no bottom
• A swing set
• A tiny plastic bag with cute purple orca (killer whales) on it
• Two Garbage bags filled with garden waste
• A picnic table
• Three carpets
• A red sweater
• Two election signs from the municipal election of 2006
• An axle from a small car
• A muffler
• A small pile of electrical wires and extension cords

I’m not sure I could be less impressed at the moment. Public green space in the form of a community recreation area and some people are treating it like a dump. The main difference in their minds, I suppose, is that it costs money to take things to the dump most of the time.

Yes, I’ve exceed the original estimate and I think I’m about 2/3 of the way through Chapter 23 (still of 26). I’m projecting a mid-May completion of the first draft. Think I’ve got between 10 and 12k left to write. After that, I’m going to put it away for a little while before I think about any edits. Problem is, I’m coming up with things I want to go back and fix or add in already.

At one hundred or so words per day by hand, I’m almost 7k into the next novel, too. I think the quality is a bit variable on this one so far as I’m sometimes on the edge of sleep as I lie in bed scribbling.

Shouldn’t every day be Earth Day?  I think we’re slowly moving in that direction.  It’s preying on my mind a lot lately about the kind of world I’m helping to leave to my children.  My wife and I have attempted to live greener in a small way for a long time now, recycling more than most of the rest of our neigbourhood combined, paying more attention to the contents of our food, actually thinking about energy usage.  I’m pushing it to the next level in the last few months.  I’ve done a detailed analysis of our energy consumption (oh, how I love my numbers), set some realistic goals, and made lists of projects to cut down on electricity, gas, and water usage.  The planning is as much fun as the savings on the various bills and most of the projects so far don’t require a lot of work (well, insulating the water heater was a mild pain in the ass, but there’s far more yet to come).  A few projects accomplished already and many things planned for the coming months, but the very first thing I looked at was my favourite appliance/tool/electronic toy: the computer.

I have no idea how much power the computer actually uses, but I do know that we used to leave it on far too much.  XP seems to have a depressingly long boot up time on my machine and I hate waiting.  The Hibernate function is great when you remember to use it, but I often didn’t and neither did anyone else in the house who uses it.  I had a closer look at the power options settings and changed one tiny little thing so that the sleep button built into my keyboard hibernates the computer instead.  Now it’s easy enough that even the kids can be trained to use it when they walk away from the internet.  Then I put a couple of nails in the wall and hung the power bar where it can be reached - not exactly pretty, but it’s in a corner of the office and doesn’t stand out much.  Hibernate, then kill the power bar to eliminate however much vampire power the box draws.  I don’t know how much this is saving me (yet), but at a cost of two nails I certainly broke even in the first few minutes after I turned the power bar off the first time.  We’re employing power bars in a couple of other spots to eliminate some other vampire draws, too.

Little things can make me very happy sometimes.

Still in Chapter 22, which might take me close to the 90,000 mark all by itself.  My outline contains four more chapters after this one.  Plus I’ve got a pair of subplots that haven’t actually been resolved and their resolutions seem not to have made it into the outline.  This novel seems to get a little bigger every time I stop to think about it.

Happy Earth Day, everyone.

Bread is an amazing thing. For those of you part of the low-carb or no-carb craze that I wish would end, sorry. You’re going to disagree with this entire post, I think.

You see, I like bread. I eat toast nearly every morning for breakfast. If that sounds boring, think about how many different kinds of bread are available and how many different things that you can put on it and still consider it breakfasty (recognizing that your mileage may vary), even nothing but butter works fine sometimes. Currently, I’m moving from a honey phase into a blueberry jam phase. The only time I don’t have toast for breakfast is if I’m out of both butter margarine or have forgotten to use the breadmaker the night before.

Oh yes, I make my own. It’s very, very easy. Dump the stuff in, press a few buttons, and wait a couple of hours. Bread. Very rarely do I make it the old fashioned way - it’s fun but time consuming and I have three kids and work weird hours. Sometimes I’ll just let the bread machine make the dough then bake it myself. Nothing beats the smell of bread baking. But most of the time I let the bread machine take care of all the details.

And for those of you who are non-toast lovers, bread is for more than just breakfast.  If you’ve never eaten your hamburger on a cheese and onion kaiser, you’ve never eaten a hamburger.  Roast beef on twelve grain, ham and cheese on rye.  Dense or light, fat or flat.  Baguette and Pirog and Naan.  It’s the closest thing to a true universal food, thousands of years old, around since someone first figured out what to do with grain crushed into powder, and developed into a vareity unmatched by any other food.

Ah, bread.  Could civilization have developed without you?  I think not.

A solid count today, if not quite as free flowing as yesterday’s finished chapter.  The scene I worked on today didn’t start as well defined in my head before I tried to send it into the keyboard and the remainder of Chapter 10.5 is a bit fuzzy but should arrive in some form over the next couple of days.  Then comes the push to the big climactic finale.  It’s looking good.

He might still blot out the sun, but did so better for people lower to the ground who had to look around his expanding stomach.

I’m once again not going to rant today.  Don’t seem to do much of that lately.  I’m avoiding all non-political news at the moment - there are too many dead children featured in news stories right now and I find that the most depressing thing.  As far as politics goes, interesting things are happening on both sides of the border, but I’m finding it much harder to be excited about the US presidential race at the moment in light of the stagnant inaction in Parliament on anything of substance whatsoever.  Things are even less exciting at the provincial level, or they might be if anyone actually covered them.

But I’ve got plenty of great podcast material for commutes and other non-writing quiet time.  I’m branching out a bit more lately, reaching further afield.  My latest discovery is the Mr. Deity video podcast, recommended by Steve Eley of Escape Pod fame.  Funniest thing I’ve run across in a long time.  Not really suitable for kids and unfortunately not good for commuting, but it’s hilarious enough to spend the time watching.

They stopped at some unseen and unheard signal, evenly spaced so that the first pair stood two paces from the sarcophagus and the last stood two paces from where the doors swung their widest.

What an awkward sentence.  It’s the last sentence I wrote today and while it isn’t quite the worst, it’s far from the best.  It also has the virtue of telling you absolutely nothing about what’s going on in the novel right now, except that someone is dead.  Maybe.

I’m now projecting a little over 100,000 words for the finished first draft.  There, I said it and now that I have it will probably be suddenly over at 95 or stretch out to 105.  Well, the bigger number is far more likely than the smaller.  Either way, I’m certain that I’ll type headlong through the 90k goal line before the end of the month.  This first draft contains vast swaths of unreadable prose (and it ain’t over yet, baby).  The second draft will hopefully improve on it quite a bit and it’s likely to be significantly longer than the first.  Once I get to that point, I’ll start looking for some victims, er first readers I mean, to inflict it on. 

My other problem is that focusing exclusively on the novel this month (plus a little transcribing of the next novel that I’ve got about 6,000 words written long hand already) means that other ideas are starting to pile up in the back of my brain.  I think I’ve recognized that I’m never going to be able to write every story that occurs to me, but I’ve got to let them loose somehow.

To blog, or not to blog?  It is a question.

I have things I’m irritated about: our idiot Conservative Federal government, that next season will be the last for Corner Gas, the fact that the Reservation next to my town doesn’t have clean water for half its inhabitants.  The first isn’t a specific enough irritation for me to bother with today, the second is probably more of a sadness, and the third I don’t know enough about because I just learned it today via a billboard of sorts beside the highway, and I haven’t been able to find any significant details on the internet.

I have things I’m joyful about: that we managed to get my son to go shoe shopping and found shoes that he likes enough to actually wear, that I’ve got a vacation coming up at the end of the month, that the health of a certain relative is improving, and that my name was mentioned in the outro of a podcast novel episode this week.  I just learned this a little after midnight when I finished listening to the episode in question.  For the curious (and if you’re not, you should be), it was the second episode of Chasing the Bard by Philippa Ballantine and if you’ve ever enjoyed a fantasy story in the past, this is a good one to try.  If you haven’t, but have considered it, it’s still a good one to try.  And no, not because she gave me a shout out (Surprised, shocked, and yes, I blushed.), but because it’s a fun story so far and promises to get better.

Hmm, I guess the answer is to blog.

One thousand two hundred nineteen words tonight and one scene shy of finishing the chapter eventually to be labelled 23.  It’s 21 at the moment, but at some point I need to go back and write a pair of shorter action-packed chapters that I added in to the outline after the fact as part of the background to certain events.  I’m pleased with the progress.

Beijing seems to be worried that the world is ganging up on China. This comes as a surprise? Really though, mobbing the torch in Paris or San Francisco and global protests of thousands of people seems a little tame next to oh, say Tianamen square in early June of 1989, much less the events in Tibet or the routine human rights and environmental abuses in China itself. My own view is that more protesting should have happened when China was first awarded the games back in, was it late 2001 or early 2002? I believe that giving China the Olympics is on par with allowing Nazi Germany to host them in 1936.

Easy enough to type that in the cool safety of my basement.

The question on so many lips seems to be: should we boycott the games? I think no. That would punish the athletes, not China. The time to announce a boycott was when the games were first awarded. It’s far too late now and would only deprive the athletes a chance at dreams they’ve worked really hard for. I do think that any western political or public figures planning to attend the opening or closing ceremonies of the games should let their seats stay empty. And I think that the rest of us shouldn’t watch them on TV. That won’t punish China, either, but it might make an interesting statement to the state. The low TV ratings would make almost as interesting a statement to the networks in question to start thinking more responsibly about things.

And really, punishing China isn’t the objective. The objective is, or should be, finding ways to pressure China into becoming a positive force in the world instead of the power and energy hungry beast that it currently seems to be. Is China after global domination? Gods, I hope not, but the government running things sure doesn’t seem to give a shit about anything other than maintaining power and its vision of superiority.

Oh, and yes, absolutely Free Tibet.

There’s no way I’m going to be finished in 11,117 words. It’s probably going to take something close to twice that. I’m not going to change the target metre, though - I’ve got this kind of perverse desire to see the progress hit 113% or whatever it winds up being. The ultimate word count will be whatever it takes for me to finish telling the story.

So the April Fool’s Day deadline has come and gone and zero submissions have gone out.  One is going tomorrow, though, and I think two more should follow within a couple of days.

There is a flood warning for our area, but we’re high enough above the river that there’s no danger unless the sump pump stops working.  It’s putting in some OT after a relaxing winter, spenind nearly as much time on as off and sending lots of melt on its way.  No April fool’s jokes to speak of.  Since I slept through the relevant part of the day in preparation for a night shift, that’s not really all that surprising.

Broken the 70k barrier.  Wow.  This is closing in on being three times as long as the longest story I’ve ever finished, a mark recently set at 24,756 words by the novella I mentioned last post, breaking my previous record by 1028 words.  Dragon Summer, or whatever it eventually ends up being called, looks like it’s going to go somewhere past the 90k estimate I made originally, maybe even as far as 100k words.  And that’s just the first draft.  History tells me that my short stories get 10-15% longer when I’m finished editing to the second draft and I wonder if that will hold true with a novel, too.  Not to get too far ahead of myself, though.  I still have to finish it, but it’s looking good.

I’ve decided not to start on any new short fiction this month and focus on hitting the novel hard.  I’m currently in chapter 19 of what looks to be 27, but I plot pretty loosely so numbers are fluid.  If I do come in somewhere around the 90k mark, it’s just possible that I might get there by the end of this month.