I don't have a printer but my Mom does and I hope to be at her house by Monday. Can't wait to print this out and fill it out. Maybe multiple copies and fly some off the Longview-Rainier Bridge over the Columbia River. Or better yet rolled up in a bottle and dropped into the river. Or both.
Does that seem a bit too extravagant? Obnoxious? This was my fourth attempt and first win.
Finally a snippet from my NaNo novel which I'm willing to share. It took two days of reworking it to get it to this point. I crossed the finish line shortly before noon yesterday but have not uploaded to NaNo's verifier yet as I was focused on getting this prepared. I'm going to get that done before I start my blog visiting for Snippets, TT and Poetry Train. Said visits will be the focus of all my Internet activity for the next week but may be hit and miss over the next few days as I'm supposedly traveling north to spend a couple weeks with my family in Longview, Washington.
I'm not sure exactly when as I've not heard from my sister yet as to when they will be driving through here on their way back from visiting with my Mother's family in Gerber and Sacramento where they spent Thanksgiving. I haven't even started to pack yet and that is going to be a huge endeavor as the chaos in my room reflects the chaos of my Spring Fever manuscript. I've not been keeping atop the clutter for several weeks and haven't done laundry since the weekend before Thanksgiving. I hope my sister took me seriously when my last IM message was that I would not start packing until she called to let me know when to expect them. When they stopped by to see me on their way back last year she called from her cell phone as as they approached the Phoenix exit on I5. Since our trailer park is right next to it they were here within five minutes.
OK. Enough blathering. Here is a snippet from the second chapter of Spring Fever, it has no title of its own yet but it may be helpful to know that this chapter is governed by the themes expressed in the Emperor's card of the tarot.
I made the NaNo 50,000 before noon today but I'm waiting until tomorrow to upload to the verifier as I've still got to transfer it into a text file and then scramble it. I wasn't in a hurry to get that done today because when I input my word count for yesterday at just after 11PM my time, the scripts at NaNo credited it to today which left me with another zero showing for yesterday. The same thing had happened to me the first week when I input my word count just after 9PM my time and that quite frustrated me since I was scrupulous to not start writing until after midnight on the first day and was assured that I had until midnight on the 30th to verify. A couple of weeks later though I input after ten and got credit for the still current day. So I relaxed. Then this happened last night.
I decided early today that I wouldn't worry about updating my word count today at all because, for one thing, whose gonna believe that total of near 7K for a single day? And for another I hoped to get one scene polished enough to input into the excerpt form at NaNo finally and then use it for my Friday Snippet this evening also. That project was going quite well all afternoon and evening but its still not quite ready to post.
I'm not getting nearly enough return on investment of minutes to warrant continuing to force it. This is due in part to having had only three hours of sleep this morning because I could not go back to sleep after Ed woke me up to tell me to relax about going after our glasses today because his Dad was going to drive him over to pick up both pair and then drive him to work before returning here with mine. I was just too excited to go back to sleep. I had them before eight-thirty. For the first several hours I was silently singing 'I can see! I can see! I can see!' I was able to change the font I was working with for my NaNo story from 20pt down to 12pt. I discovered I could read some of my most important reference materials without a magnifying glass again. I tested a page in The Historian, the novel I was reading for the Read-a-Thon in October and so demoralized me then when I found my reading speed had slipped below 20 pages per hour from the better than 50 of six years ago.
But by mid afternoon things were not so thrilling. I was suffering what amounted to motion sickness brought on by my efforts to focus and refocus between screen, keyboard and reference material through the unfamiliar bifocals. I also lost a lot of time to attempts to reorganize my workspace to find a better level for the screen so that I wouldn't have to point my nose at the ceiling in order to focus through the lower part of the lenses.
I lost even more time to an exploration of a baby name site to look for a new last name for my male POV. I've been unhappy with it almost from the get go but hadn't wanted to take the time to look for another one. It is one of those things I can easily spend all day contemplating and researching and I was deliberately denying myself the right to indulge that little fetish. But when I chose one of his POV scenes to showcase and began working on it this morning, I just couldn't keep typing 'Professor Simons' it wasn't clicking for me. I couldn't bond with him. I considered going with his middle name, Palmer, as his last. That almost worked but I had reasons for wanting his last name to reflect either his Italian or Jewish heritage. After more than an hour I found this: Carmelo is pronounced kar-MAY-loh. It is of Italian and Hebrew origin, and its meaning is "fruitful orchard; garden". Biblical place name: refers to Mount Carmel in Israel, which is referred to in ancient writings as a kind of paradise. What better name for a man who has made Dante's Divine Comedy the focus of his life? There are actually several reasons this name and it's meanings mesh right in with the fabric of this story, thematically and otherwise.
Since settling on that around two this afternoon, I was able to make quite good progress on a rewrite of one of Professor Graham Palmer Carmelo's scenes. I thoroughly enjoyed the time I spent in his company too. This is the way I keep anticipating the whole month of NaNo will be like and then get horribly dispirited when there are only there or four days like this out of the entire thirty.
There is a very good chance I can have this scene ready to post by early afternoon tomorrow. That is if I can get some solid rejuvenating sleep first.
Thirteen More Whacky Title/Author Combos
The purpose of the meme is to get to know everyone who participates a little bit better every Thursday. Visiting fellow Thirteeners is encouraged! If you participate, leave the link to your Thirteen in others comments. It's easy, and fun! Be sure to update your Thirteen with links that are left for you, as well! I will link to everyone who participates and leaves a link to their 13 things. Trackbacks, pings, comment links accepted!
5996 words to go. Three days of NaNo left. Ain't got many words left in me tonight so let me say it with pics:
Be careful what you ask for.
I'm sitting at 37511 words for my NaNo and 70 Day round two project. To earn my NaNo win I must maintain a pace of about 2500 words per day for five more days. By several times surpassing the 3200 word daily quota that earlier lack of progress had subjected me to by last Wednesday, I've managed to make the next five days a bit more manageable. But I must say, I'm feeling fragile and frangible right now. I'm exhausted and I've overused my hands and eyes since Wednesday after the breakthrough I made last Tuesday. I've clocked in over 15K since last Sunday just on my NaNo novel, Spring Fever. That doesn't count the blog posts, commenting on other blogs, emails, IM, and note-taking and journaling unrelated to the NaNo or Sven projects.
I'm posting this progress report tonight instead of my poem for Monday Poetry Train. I'm still hoping to post the poem sometime tomorrow, I'm just too tired and distracted tonight and my hands are about to go on strike. I'm producing a typo for for about every eight to ten keystrokes.
This is the continuation of last week's snippet. I repeated a few of the paragraphs near the end of last week's so the context wouldn't be too hard to slip into here. But if you missed last week's it might be worth it to catch up first as some of what follows makes makes little sense standing on its own.
Part One.
To remind you, the story is about Marion, a woman in her late forties who is loosing her eyesight and suffering symptoms of menopause and has been holing up in her room for most of the winter. Her suitor is EMT Clay, a man about eight years younger whom she has held at a distance for nearly two decades. He'd fallen for her the night he helped deliver her son shortly after the young widow with a small daughter had moved in with her blind mother next door. Marion's own daughter Ernestine, recently abandoned by her husband, has moved in with her daughter Verna. As this part opens Ernestine is calling her mother and daughter to breakfast and they were off to wash up.
Thirteen Things I'm Thankful For
The purpose of the meme is to get to know everyone who participates a little bit better every Thursday. Visiting fellow Thirteeners is encouraged! If you participate, leave the link to your Thirteen in others comments. It's easy, and fun! Be sure to update your Thirteen with links that are left for you, as well! I will link to everyone who participates and leaves a link to their 13 things. Trackbacks, pings, comment links accepted!
Having seen several 70 Days and NaNo participants displaying celebrity pics on their blogs as representations and inspirations for their heroes and heroines, I decided to give it a try when I was having trouble visualizing my hero, Graham.
I really had no idea who in famedom might fit the vague image I did have. I saw him as tall, lanky, slightly stoop-shouldered, thick dark hair shading to gray at the temples, a bit bashful, stern professor but capable of humor and tenderness. I knew he was of Italian and Jewish heritage and fifty give or take four years.
Not many remembered icons floated through my mind before I hit on Alan Alda. By the time I'd read the first sentence of the Wikipedia article on Alda I was fairly sure I'd found my guy. He was of Italian heritage. From there I went to alanalda.com where I found his personal photo album and when I saw this picture I knew I would find nothing better if I spent a week looking. Sorry, but I can't post that pic here as I don't want to infringe on copyright or anything. So please follow the link, it's worth it. Remember, my Graham is a Literature Prof.
While I was on Alda's site, I went exploring and found a link to an article by Alda with a title that was hard to resist. I'm glad I didn't. In, Learning To Write With a Sledgehammer, Alda talks of how he learned the value of knocking the excrescences out of his manuscripts and of those moments when you make a breakthrough and have the urge to get up and dance.
On first reading, I passed over the sledgehammer reference, thinking it only a post NaNo, post 70 Days, editing consideration. But I glommed onto the reference to those moments which inspire a celebratory dance, for I've had a one of them and it was exquisitely sweet. I haven't had any yet with Spring Fever though I came close in the week before NaNo started when the plot concept first began to gell and I began to believe I had story worth telling.
But Alda's reference reminded me of the time that I did get up out of my chair and dance about the room over one of my stories. It was the moment I typed the last word of Making Rag Doll Babies and Million Dollar Maybes nearly ten years ago. It wasn't even the end of the novel. Just the end of a chapter in the intended novel. But it had been an intricately plotted 16,000+ word 'short' story that was intended to serve as a chapter and to be able to stand alone--as all the chapters in my novel, The Substance of Things Hoped For, are intended to do. I was ecstatic when I finished it and literally could not contain my self. I wasn't even alone in the room at the time.
Requiring each chapter to be able to both stand alone as a short story and serve to advance the plot of a novel does, of course, add an extra complexity to the construction of that novel which made it that much harder to keep a 1K a day pace with it during the first round of 70 Days this past summer. That and the fact it is tangled up with the similarly complex plots of six to eight other novels. This was why I had chosen to run with a fresh story for NaNo. One that was not entangled with the Fruits of the Spirit story world nor restricted by a complex structure. For the first two weeks I worked with Spring Fever, I was confident I was writing a fairly straightforward love story. But by the end of the first week of NaNo I knew different.
My decision to structure the novel around 22 chapters based on the Major Arcana of the Tarot was exciting when I hit on it. As was the decision to alternate POV among three equally weighted characters. But these restrictions were the source of the constriction of word flow in the second week. I was, and am, still thrilled with those choices but after about four days of zero word count following those first six or so of exceeding expectations, I began to panic and I really haven't stopped. Though I got the words to flow again, intermittently, the fun had gone out of it.
All of this was on my mind and apparently Alda's talk about taking a sledgehammer to his manuscripts began to work on me unawares as I put together my virtual scrapbook of Graham-conjuring images. I tried to remember when was the last time I had junked a huge chunk of one of my manuscripts. And I couldn't. I don't think it is faulty memory. I'm fairly sure I've never done it. I've thrown out words in the hundreds but never in the thousands. I've deleted sentences and paragraphs or severely reconstructed them but never whole scenes or chapters or sections of a novel. This is mostly because I am such a miser with the words until I am fairly certain of what I need a scene for. In other words, most of the story is contained in my head like a scene in a snow globe that shifts like scenes on the silver screen--like watching a movie in 3D while holding it cupped in your hand.
Ah, I thought, a bit pleased with myself to be sure, I've never had to take a sledgehammer to excrescences in my stories because I never put them in. But before the thought was complete, I recognized what a conceit it was. What was it Alda said he had danced for joy over?I was dancing because, after hours of rewriting one of the scenes, I had finally solved it and had crashed through to something I knew would work.
Which meant that something he had tried had not been working. Something he had written had not been working!
So, I thought, what happens when something I'm working on stops working? I stop working on it. Indefinitely. As long as a decade in the case of several of the stories in my Fruits of the Spirit story world.
The thing that isn't working for Spring Fever right now is my insistence on trying to hold 22 themed chapters, 3 POV characters, a 30 odd year time line in my head while refusing to commit to writing scenes that aren't perfectly envisioned and locked into place on the three story arcs. No wonder I am feeling half crazed. I don't dare stop thinking about the story for one second. Not even in my sleep. Because if I do? I might drop the snow globe and shatter the story.
That is simply not working. And most especially for a NaNo project or a 70 Days of Sweat project. I have to start writing some of this down even if it is not in a form that will make the final cut. Even if I have to break all the rules of good form to do so. I need to infodump folks. I need to write long passages of description of people, places and things that aren't, for now, broken up by dialog and plot advancing narrative. I need to experiment with scene concepts, writing it one way and then a second and a third until I feel that certain click when something snaps into place. And I need for those words to count toward NaNo and 70 Days even if they sometimes feel more like note taking then story writing. Because that restriction, added to my natural perfectionism served to strangle my word flow as thoroughly as a garrote.
I'm so far behind now, at just past 20K, there is little hope that I will earn my NaNo win icon. But little is still not no. And besides, regardless if I can keep the new 3K per day pace for the next ten days, I still need to keep the 1K per day pace through mid January for Sven.
My goal now is to have 40-50K and several excrescences to take the sledgehammer to by midnight November 30th. And then for the final six weeks of 70 Days to add another 20-30K, possibly split between Spring Fever and The Substance of Things Hoped For. To do this, I need to remember Alda's words:
"Say what?"
Sometimes I think it should be Ed instead of me with the aspirations to be a writer. He is a much better storyteller even in his sleep.
As I was sitting here staring at the blank white of blogger's platform, trying to decide on what to make my post about, he put his hand on my back and said, "Could I ask a really really big favor? Is there anyway I could get you to make me a peanut butter and butter sandwich? And since I'm eating for three, you might as well make two."
He had been asleep for two hours at this point and it isn't unusual for him to ask me to go fill his water bottle or make him a middle of the night sandwich. But when he added that last, I knew he was talking in his sleep. Even when I turned and he met my eyes with both of his. I have carried on the most comical and entertaining conversations with him when he is talking in his sleep.
I asked him, "Are you awake?" and he said, "Probably." So I asked, "What do you mean you're eating for three?" and he said, "I'm eating for the shipping dock supervisor and the truck driver who doesn't have to worry about his load ...." his explanation faded into a series of mumbles, umms and snores. But his eyes were still open and apparently focused on mine. I said, "Ed, your aren't at work." He said, "Oh." and then "Well, I never claimed to be logical." And I laughed because that is exactly what he's always claiming this Mr. Spock wannabe. And he added, "Well not all the time." I then said, "I think you are talking in your sleep." and he said, "Probably." I asked, "You sure you want that sandwich?" He nodded and said. "Two."
So I went and made the sandwiches.
At least it was something I could do for him. There are times he asks me to do things that aren't doable. Like running up to his office to get the product numbers for the manifest. Or entering the data on the day's events into the work sheet. Or sending a nastygram (a chiding email) to Fulfillment and Support asking where his product was. Or writing a req (a request) to HR for six more line workers.
It's not always about work. Over the summer it was often about the dirt track races, a computer tech issue, or the novel he was reading just before bed. But this is the season when he works overtime so this is pretty much what I can expect until after Christmas. After Thanksgiving these conversations will probably be the only ones consisting of multiple syllables that I will get with him until the Friday before Christmas.
Join us for a moment of serenity
Read more...I'm late getting my snippet up again this week.
Sigh.
This time it was due to an eye doctor appointment this morning which meant that I couldn't stay up all night last night preparing the post and then visiting. I thought I would be able to get to work on it when we got home but I had not bargained on having dilated eyes. And then we had company this evening.
I chose this snipped today for several reasons. First because it features a woman living with visual impairment and that's been on my mind this week because of the upcoming eye doctor visit. Also because it features a woman in her late forties feeling sorry for herself because of her passing youth and disability and that was also a feature of my week as I said a final good-bye to my late forties on Tuesday.
I wrote this while still in my mid thirties. It is a short story and I almost posted the whole 2369 words. But I decided to split it in two.
Oh, another reason I selected this story for now is that the character, Marion, has popped up as a supporting character in two of my Fruit of the Spirit novels so far and I am leaning hard toward using her in Spring Fever, my NaNo novel this year. Which would essentially bring Spring Fever into the Fruit of the Spirit fold. I don't know if I ever intend to give her her own novel but her profession as a trauma psychiatrist comes in real handy.
I think it is time for another batch of those silly Title/Author combos. I warned in October that I might resort to this when the pressure was on during NaNo and 70 Days. I won't run out of these anytime soon. The list sent to me vis eamil some years ago is eleven pages in 10pt font. I haven't even read them all myself yet. This third batch doesn't even finish up the first page, though I will have to move into page two to make thirteen the next time I do this.
See the post below this for a progress report (of a sort) on NaNo.
Thirteen Funny Book/Author Combos.
The purpose of the meme is to get to know everyone who participates a little bit better every Thursday. Visiting fellow Thirteeners is encouraged! If you participate, leave the link to your Thirteen in others comments. It's easy, and fun! Be sure to update your Thirteen with links that are left for you, as well! I will link to everyone who participates and leaves a link to their 13 things. Trackbacks, pings, comment links accepted!
I'm so far behind now, I feel like throwing my hands up. I'm only about one quarter of the way to the goal on the night before the halfway mark should have been met. I'm closing in on 13,000 but should be closing in on 25,000. Which means I need to average 1.5 times the 1667 words per day pace for the last 16 days. And that is not looking doable from where I sit right now. We're talking a daily pace of 2500 words per day. It isn't outside the realm of possibility but so unlikely I am feeling really discouraged.
I should be feeling rather pleased with myself though because today I made nearly 2000 words. But because I was aiming for 3500. And I had a fairly good chance of reaching it too because I made 1500 in 90 minutes this morning. I took a necessary break after that frantic push, intending to get right back to work but when I got back to my computer it was not cooperating with me. I though maybe I'd finally pushed the envelope to far with too many aps and windows open. But it turned out that my laptop had been commandeered by the update manager. My attempt to get back to work was met with frustration after frustration. Moving from window to window became exercises in meditation on the spinning hourglass against whited out windows. I was nervous that I was going to have to force a restart but I couldn't remember if I had saved my work before walking away from the computer.
Then the computer announces to me that updates had been downloaded and a restart was necessary to complete installation and the computer would restart automatically in 4:55; 4:48; 4:32.. The buttons gave me the option of: Restart Now and Restart Later. I clicked later and started saving my work and closing the applications. The dang alert came back every five minutes. That whole process took me longer than pumping out those 1500 words. I was so mad. Why today? Why in the middle of most peoples prime work hours. I fumed and ranted in my head during the whole procedure. If only I could have been typing those thoughts. I'd have had a much more interesting post than this.
Really, I don't get this proprietary attitude of programmers over a product that is no longer in their possession. I mean, it feels like a kind of theft to me. It steals my time and productivity. It commandeers the major tool with which I work right in the middle of a work session in which I am on a roll! How many employers would put up with the technology in the workplace if this was done to the computers of the average cubicle worker? I mean, REALLY!!!
And of course getting all worked up about it served no purpose other than to take my focus off my story and onto a frustration in which my obsessive-compulsive mind just glories in wallowing. By the time I the laptop got back to the welcome screen and I was able to click onto my desktop, I was exhausted. It takes another ten to fifteen minutes just to load my desktop. It was after noon by now and I'd been awake since six-thirty on less than seven hours of sleep after being awake for twenty hours on Tuesday--2AM to 10PM during which I advanced over 2000 words. I was tired of sitting on the edge of the bed watching a screen which I could do nothing with. I was just plain tired. So I lay down.
I was contemplating going ahead and making the walk to the library again this week even though neither me nor Ed needed any more books to see us through another week. I just wanted to get out of this room! I was going over in my mind the things I needed to do to get ready to leave. The next thing I knew I was opening my eyes in a dark room and it was 5:06. I was disgusted with myself and my mood has not improved in the last six hours.
Your date of conception was on or about 20 February 1957 which was a Wednesday.
You were born on a Wednesday
under the astrological sign Scorpio.
Your Life path number is 1.
Your fortune cookie reads:
You were born with the skill to communicate with people easily.
Life Path Compatibility:
You are most compatible with those with the Life Path numbers 1, 5 & 7.
You should get along well with those with the Life Path numbers 3 & 9.
You may or may not get along well with those with the Life Path number 8.
You are least compatible with those with the Life Path numbers 2, 4, 6, 11 & 22.
The Julian calendar date of your birth is 2436155.5.
The golden number for 1957 is 1.
The epact number for 1957 is -1.
The year 1957 was not a leap year.
Your birthday falls into the Chinese year beginning 1/31/1957 and ending 2/17/1958.
You were born in the Chinese year of the Rooster.
Your Native American Zodiac sign is Snake; your plant is Thistle.
You were born in the Egyptian month of Tyby, the first month of the season of Poret (Emergence - Fertile soil).
Your date of birth on the Hebrew calendar is 20 Heshvan 5718.
Or if you were born after sundown then the date is 21 Heshvan 5718.
The Mayan Calendar long count date of your birthday is 12.17.4.1.11 which is
12 baktun 17 katun 4 tun 1 uinal 11 kin
The Hijra (Islamic Calendar) date of your birth is Wednsday, 19 Rabi'u'th-Thani 1377 (1377-4-19).
The date of Easter on your birth year was Sunday, 21 April 1957.
The date of Orthodox Easter on your birth year was Sunday, 21 April 1957.
The date of Ash Wednesday (the first day of Lent) on your birth year was Wednesday 6 March 1957.
The date of Whitsun (Pentecost Sunday) in the year of your birth was Sunday 9 June 1957.
The date of Whisuntide in the year of your birth was Sunday 16 June 1957.
The date of Rosh Hashanah in the year of your birth was Tuesday, 24 September 1957.
The date of Passover in the year of your birth was Sunday, 14 April 1957.
The date of Mardi Gras on your birth year was Tuesday 5 March 1957.
As of 11/13/2007 10:19:57 PM EST
You are 50 years old.
You are 600 months old.
You are 2,609 weeks old.
You are 18,262 days old.
You are 438,310 hours old.
You are 26,298,619 minutes old.
You are 1,577,917,197 seconds old.
Celebrities who share your birthday:Rachel Bilson (1981) Whoopi Goldberg (1955) Chris Noth (1954) Jean Seberg (1938) Oskar Werner (1922) Nathaniel Benchley (1915) Louis Brandeis (1856) Robert Louis Stevenson (1850)
Top songs of 1957All Shook Up by Elvis Presley Love Letters In the Sand by Pat Boone Jailhouse Rock by Elvis Presley Teddy Bear by Elvis Presley April Love by Pat Boone Young Love by Tab Hunter Tammy by Debbie Reynolds Honeycomb by Jimmie Rodgers Wake Up Little Susie by Everly Brothers You Send Me by Sam Cooke
Your age is the equivalent of a dog that is 7.14755381604697 years old. (You old hound dog, you!)
Your lucky day is Tuesday.
Your lucky number is 9 & 11.
Your ruling planet(s) is Mars & Pluto.
Your lucky dates are 1st, 10th, 19th, 28th.
Your opposition sign is Taurus.
Your opposition number(s) is 6.
Today is not one of your lucky days!
There are 366 days till your next birthday
on which your cake will have 51 candles.
Those 51 candles produce 51 BTUs,
or 12,852 calories of heat (that's only 12.8520 food Calories!) .
You can boil 5.83 US ounces of water with that many candles.
In 1957 there were approximately 4.0 million births in the US.
In 1957 the US population was approximately 150,697,361 people, 50.7 persons per square mile.
In 1957 in the US there were approximately 1,667,231 marriages (11.1%) and 385,144 divorces (2.6%)
In 1957 in the US there were approximately 1,452,000 deaths (9.6 per 1000)
In the US a new person is born approximately every 8 seconds.
In the US one person dies approximately every 12 seconds.
In 1957 the population of Australia was approximately 9,744,087.
In 1957 there were approximately 220,358 births in Australia.
In 1957 in Australia there were approximately 73,696 marriages and 6,298 divorces.
In 1957 in Australia there were approximately 84,953 deaths.
Your birthstone is Citrine
The Mystical properties of Citrine
Citrine is said to help one connect with Spirit.Some lists consider these stones to be your birthstone. (Birthstone lists come from Jewelers, Tibet, Ayurvedic Indian medicine, and other sources)
Yellow Topaz, Pearl, Diamond
Chestnut Tree, the HonestyOf unusual beauty, does not want to impress, well-developed sense of justice, vivacious, interested, a born diplomat, but irritable and sensitive in company, often due to a lack of self-confidence, acts sometimes superior, feels not understood, loves only once, has difficulties in finding a partner.
I had no idea such things as techno remixes of classical music existed. I found them while exploring YouTube for Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring and Vivaldi's Four Seasons in relation to my NaNo novel, Spring Fever.
I like.
I've had a major slow down in word production on Spring Fever, my NaNo novel, this week. When the words stopped flowing and I found myself all in a tangle on Tuesday, (a great disappointment after such a feverish start,) I began spending more time on the various crash courses I needed to flesh out the plot and the character's lives.
See my TT this week for a glimpse into the story and an idea of how many topics are involved. It is to be expected, I suppose, when you have two professors and a grad student as major POV characters and each with special interests and needs. Below are just some of the resources I've turned to so that I can pretend myself into the mind of a poet living with MS; a professor passionate about Dante; a grad student incorporating dance and the tarot into her thesis and who gives birth twice in the course of the novel. Which reminds me, I still have to research surrogacy, embryo freezing, and midwifery. Since I'm creating this to collect my resources as much as anything else, I may have to update as I add resources.
Among the books I've been reading are:
>>Joseph Campbell's Masks of God, leaning heavily on V.1. Primitive Mythology
>>Clarissa Pinkola Estes' Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype
>>Jamke Highwater's Language of Vision: Meditations on Myth and Metaphor which is organized around the Major Arcana of the tarot and gave me the idea to do the same for my story.
>>Dante's Divine Comedy--Since I have a copy in the Britannica Great Books set, I've been dipping in now and then to read a paragraph or three.
>>Also in the GB set is Aristotle's works and I've dipped into his Rhetoric and On Poetics. Something I expect a professor of Medieval Literature would know.
Always useful as a resource whenever music is involved or excerpts from documentaries might be helpful is YouTube. So when it occurred to me that Vivaldi's Four Seasons and Igor Stravinsky's ballet, Rite of Spring, might merit some kind of involvement in a story called Spring Fever, that is where I headed.
| Level | Score |
|---|---|
| Purgatory (Repenting Believers) | High |
| Level 1 - Limbo (Virtuous Non-Believers) | High |
| Level 2 (Lustful) | High |
| Level 3 (Gluttonous) | Low |
| Level 4 (Prodigal and Avaricious) | Low |
| Level 5 (Wrathful and Gloomy) | Low |
| Level 6 - The City of Dis (Heretics) | Very Low |
| Level 7 (Violent) | Low |
| Level 8- the Malebolge (Fraudulent, Malicious, Panderers) | Moderate |
| Level 9 - Cocytus (Treacherous) | Very Low |
This is another snippet from the same story as last week. It takes place some nine years after last week's scene. But this was the first scene I ever wrote for this story and it is in the omniscient POV. Since most of the rest of the novel is to be told in Vivian's POV this will have to be rewritten. Though another option would be to let it stand as prologue.
70 Days of Sweat
Epic Kindle Giveaway Jan 11-13 2012
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