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Sunday, October 8th, 2006 05:30 pm
I'm working really slowly on a total rewrite of chapter four of Afterwar. This is a chapter whose purpose is a little obscure, and the way it was originally written it was really hard to care about. But after getting the critique on the first three chapters I have an additional goal for every chapter: which is to establish and advance my man of action as a man of action, and not a depressive and passive creature like most of my protagonists. So in chapter four, originally, there was a bunch of stuff that just happened, and then Pablo organized a charity drive among the kids at his school, and then there was some video that caught his attention. So I moved things around and changed things so the "stuff that happened" was mostly initiated by Pablo, and the controversy which was mentioned in passing before is moved more front and center and Pablo gets to be in the middle of it. But he's not omnipotent, and it's not his eloquence but a distant disaster that changes everybody's mind about things.

It's going slowly because I'm having to do a lot of invention. Usually when I write I already know most of what goes where and the only invention that happens is that weird speaking-in-tongues thing when stuff just comes out of nowhere. This is more deliberate and I have to keep stopping and thinking "What? What? How does that go?" which gives me excuses to play a round of Bunch, which is the most addicting game on the planet and I've had to restrict myself to one round at a time because otherwise four hours will go by. Only a five-level demo is online, but I don't even play all five levels: I play to maximize the score on the first level (which is a way I often end up playing these move-the-marbles games). When I first started playing, I was please to get a score in the eight hundreds. Today I got one which was nearly eight thousand and because of details that I noticed I am pretty sure that I could break eight thousand.

Oi. I'm an addict, pure and simple.

On another front, I have promised to cut tile today, but I'm worried about it because the tile saw throws water everywhere and I don't currently have a place where it's okay to throw water around. And the poor nice fellow finally had a two-day weekend and they called him in to work today because the other guy didn't show. So he's not going to find me a tarp and I'll have to ask Frank because I can't go in the shed or under the house because of past rodent occupation.

and lastly: it's a lovely day, and the ground is still wet from the first rain of the season, even though it was barely enough to call the First Flush event (and not enough in Capitola, so I think I'll be doing Urban Watch there one more time).

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