10 listopadu

I was really tired but couldn't put myself in bed till ten-thirty last night so I planned to sleep in till 6:30 and only write a thousand words. Instead I slept till almost 6, had a slow start of fooling around, and wrote about 1700 words for chapter total of 4500 and I guess a book total of 20 700. Took me an hour and a half to get those words on the screen, so I'm still running an overall average of about 1200 words an hour. Why do I care? because I'm finally interested in organizing my writing time so that it is efficient. I know that more words isn't always better. But I figure I write better when I'm revising anyway, usually, so the key is to have a good bit to revise. And of course, it's properly backed up to the latest word.

A feature of Googledocs is that you can upload a file repeatedly and it doesn't overwrite, you get different copies distinguished by the timestamp. This is good for tracking changes in different versions. I don't care to do that, so when I upload a file and it's the same chapter as the one before it, I manually delete the old version right away so I don't have to go reading timestamps later.

I found a stationary bike on craigslist and made an offer. I used to be sort of set against stationary bikes -- I figured if I was pedaling, why not go somewhere? But I need to be able to set the thing to way way easy at first to gently stretch the tight ligaments before I am interested in strengthening the muscles even. So I'm following the doctor's orders to the letter as much as I can. Yesterday my knee was aching when I left work, and that is just really really dumb. I spend the most of my day moving round from one sitting position to another, it's not that hard. I don't sit still and I don't run and I know how to lift (and anyway the heaviest child in the infant-toddler group is probably forty pounds, and she can climb the diaper ladder on her own: she doesn't really need to be lifted at all).

On another front, I complained that the articles in the "Young Child" magazine which are labelled as being about infants and toddles sound like they're being written about advanced three-year-olds, and my boss said they probably are because there are hardly any programs like ours which deal with infants per se, and the label "toddlers" includes three-year-olds.

That means . . . nobody's writing professional articles about what we do. Hmm . . .

Everybody already reads "Whatever," right?

John Scalzi usually writes gentle, friendly stuff in his blog, often silly and frivolous, a relief from the working day. Every so often he takes a moment to write something serious. Kind of frequently lately, because we live in serious times, I guess.

He does it here, where he generalizes just enough from the Penn State scandal.

I remember when I kept finding people on the science fiction newsgroups who would complain about Ursul K. LeGuin, and the example they held up as terrible writing was exactly the story Scalzi references here -- "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas." They were wrong, and Scalzi is right, as usual.