drafting

[ritaxis]

Today I am doing an outline and first draft of a floor. I have a very miscellaneous stack of mostly-green tiles of many sizes, all rectangular (from 1x1 to 12x12 square, including all the stops between except for 5, 7, 9,10, and 11: and 3x6,3x8, 4x6, and 4x8), I have a tile saw, and I have a bare floor, 6-9x16-7. YesterdayI sorted the tiles by color and size, and today I am laying them out for pattern, meanwhile mixing up the color and size sort again. After I am sure I am doing something that works, I will stack the tiles by color, size, and quadrant of the room, sweep up the crud, and begin laying tile. I think I will get as far as the stacking today, maybe to the first stripe of the floor. Yes, though I will be staking tiles by quadrant, I will be laying tiles stripes, from the outside in (considering the side where the three! doors are to be the inside, along with the stripe at the center of the room). The center of the floor is the setting for a mosaic, which I am still planning as I look at what I have, but which will be vaguely representative of kelp. Kelp is the tree of life, really, whatever anybody else thinks.
So I was thinking about the way I draft things. The way I do an outline usually is to do a short treatment -- either a long short story length or a fragment -- it looks like a failed short story. When I see what I've got, then I can plan the real novel. THat's sort of what I've done with the tiles.

So I'm taking a break because the hand therapist says you really must, and I woke up with burning sensation from my fingertips up past my elbow this morning, presumably from stacking tiles yesterday.



They rushed into the biggest room of the golden house, which had tables running all the enormous length of it. Down the center of each long table there seemed to be a garden, a weedy, smelly, messy garden which dropped flower petals and seeds and leaves all over the tabletops. More and more of the odd small people -- and also many odd larger people, and some very large people too -- came in from doors all around the sides of the room and took their seats, some of which were tall and stilty so that small people could reach the table and some of which were low slung so that the larger people could fit there.

"Come on," said the Mustard Fairy, dragging Katie across the room by her elbow. At the other end of the room was a dais, which was bright green and decorated with weedy yellow flowers ("I know what those are," Katie thought. "Those are wild mustard flowers. I always thought they weren't really mustard, but if the Mustard Fairy has them on her dais, they must be!")

Comments

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

The great architect Alvar Aalto, though he loved to talk, could not be persuaded to write. "Paper is for drawing," he once said. What he published was written by exactly the process he used in his design practice; he would write a rough draft and hand it to one of his drafters to finish.