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until later. I don't want to make despairing noises about how my countrymen listened to lies and allowed themselves to be played for fools, how they've been caught up in a dangerous theocratic fervor -- personally dangerous to me and mine, let alone the rest of the world.
When I have something to say, I hope it will be something positive about what is to be done here and now.
For now, idle chatter: I did in fact pull out all the seeds from half a dozen pomegranates and squish them with a pestle and strainer and I did put the resulting mash in to steep in vodka. And since I had bought too much vodka, I made a primarily-horehound herbal one too -- I like bitters and I hope it works out. I've been trying to make horehound candy every so often: it should be easy, you make a strong strong horehound tea and then use it in place of water to make hard-crack candy syrup, right? I get stuck on the first step.
The nice fellow brought home a door that fits the doorway between the kitchen and the back room that I tiled (slowly, we're accumulating the normal complement of doors that actually close: right now, we have only two -- my daughter's room and the bathroom. All we have for privacy upstairs is the separation of being up a flight of stairs. However, this is also going to be hard on my hands -- it's a beautiful old door but its paint is nasty nasty and it must be stripped before it can be painted. Here we go again.
Yesterday I did the surgery to graft the original version of the bus ride to Watsonville and the new one, and wrote most of the confrontation scene with Tía Citlali, which is coming sooner than I thought, but I think they'll be keeping Candelario in the dark for a bit -- this conversation takes place in Mixtec. Which I realized means that the culture I need to know more about is Mixtec, not Mayan, but my Mayan expert assures me that the folklore is regional. He came over for lamb and barley soup last night and told me a lot of stuff about Mayan history and latest discoveries.
Today: buy the green goo that is the ecologically-friendly paint stripper (it works better than the old petroleum-based stuff did too), apply for two jobs tutoring, begin the endless process of stripping paint, finish the chapter (the rest of the confrontation and some pacing, consolidation, and development work at the end: I will have my cliffhanger, but I'm not sure what it is).
I've never written like this before. I think it's a sign that I'm coming in to my own. For once all my "better ideas" go forward in the writing, and I have not had to entirely restructure the book halfway through. All the things I have marked for revision are things where I need some more research to expand a scene (the emergency room, the gunshots, the D&D conversation in the car, a little Mixtec folklore to flesh out Tía Citlali's conversations). It's kind of exciting, and it makes the task of entirely rewriting Afterwar from notes and memory less daunting. That's what I think I will do next.
By the way, for the HTML impaired like me, I got the acute accent on the Tía by going to . . . Webmonkey! Whenever I want to do something, I just look it up.
This has its limits. For example, I often don't know what the thing I want to do is called, or the method that is used to accomplish it, which means that I don't know how to look it up. But I can do a few really simple things, and when in doubt -- I use tables.
When I have something to say, I hope it will be something positive about what is to be done here and now.
For now, idle chatter: I did in fact pull out all the seeds from half a dozen pomegranates and squish them with a pestle and strainer and I did put the resulting mash in to steep in vodka. And since I had bought too much vodka, I made a primarily-horehound herbal one too -- I like bitters and I hope it works out. I've been trying to make horehound candy every so often: it should be easy, you make a strong strong horehound tea and then use it in place of water to make hard-crack candy syrup, right? I get stuck on the first step.
The nice fellow brought home a door that fits the doorway between the kitchen and the back room that I tiled (slowly, we're accumulating the normal complement of doors that actually close: right now, we have only two -- my daughter's room and the bathroom. All we have for privacy upstairs is the separation of being up a flight of stairs. However, this is also going to be hard on my hands -- it's a beautiful old door but its paint is nasty nasty and it must be stripped before it can be painted. Here we go again.
Yesterday I did the surgery to graft the original version of the bus ride to Watsonville and the new one, and wrote most of the confrontation scene with Tía Citlali, which is coming sooner than I thought, but I think they'll be keeping Candelario in the dark for a bit -- this conversation takes place in Mixtec. Which I realized means that the culture I need to know more about is Mixtec, not Mayan, but my Mayan expert assures me that the folklore is regional. He came over for lamb and barley soup last night and told me a lot of stuff about Mayan history and latest discoveries.
Today: buy the green goo that is the ecologically-friendly paint stripper (it works better than the old petroleum-based stuff did too), apply for two jobs tutoring, begin the endless process of stripping paint, finish the chapter (the rest of the confrontation and some pacing, consolidation, and development work at the end: I will have my cliffhanger, but I'm not sure what it is).
I've never written like this before. I think it's a sign that I'm coming in to my own. For once all my "better ideas" go forward in the writing, and I have not had to entirely restructure the book halfway through. All the things I have marked for revision are things where I need some more research to expand a scene (the emergency room, the gunshots, the D&D conversation in the car, a little Mixtec folklore to flesh out Tía Citlali's conversations). It's kind of exciting, and it makes the task of entirely rewriting Afterwar from notes and memory less daunting. That's what I think I will do next.
By the way, for the HTML impaired like me, I got the acute accent on the Tía by going to . . . Webmonkey! Whenever I want to do something, I just look it up.
This has its limits. For example, I often don't know what the thing I want to do is called, or the method that is used to accomplish it, which means that I don't know how to look it up. But I can do a few really simple things, and when in doubt -- I use tables.