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Plink: The Drummer Boy

ritaxis: (hat)
Sunday, May 19th, 2013 06:41 pm
I realize that I started this journal to keep track of my writing progress, but I've been using it mainly to complain. But I have been writing and writing all along.

So, this is what I did today:

Words today: 1019
Chapter  32 wordage: 2182
Total wordage (estimated as I have not been bothered to set up the master document or write down accumulated words): 170K
Estimated till the end of the draft: 3 more chapters? 15 K more words?

Writing anxiety of the day: All novel long these guys have been terse and uncommunicative.  Suddenly they're talking and talking and talking. Too much dialog? Is it in character? Is anything they ever do in character? Am I in character? Who am I? What am I?

happy little details of the day: workers talking about the strike in the same coal mines Yanek's unit was supposed to be protecting during the war, and which are owned by the relatives that disowned him before birth; and the beer being the same brand as I referenced in the green people story set in the same place a hundred years later.

Tomorrow: more goddmaned angsty dialog. Maybe some action on the factory floor.

On another front, I punted and put the violetta and violetto (yes, those are their names) artichoke plants into large pots for now, meaning that I transplanted some oregano and moved some freesia bulbs. I know it's not the time of year for the bulbs, but screw it.

Also: neighbor had a baby so I took their dog for a walk.

And: I tasted my horseradish leaves (raw) and they are kind of like arugula, not very much like the roots at all.
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I seem to have a thing going

ritaxis: (Default)
Monday, October 22nd, 2012 09:02 am
So apparently I am exploring all the different ways a person can have a magical affinity for trees. The latest story has a couple of guys constructed from willow twigs in order to be servants of black magicians. I have an unfinished one about a person who is more or less a dryad. And there is not-Poland, in which the sister is a botanist with extra tree senses (also the tendency to be a seer, but she says much more cryptic and less-detailed things when the subject is human than when it is tree), and the brother has an uncomfortable attachment to the wooded wetland, and will eventually be rather like the lorax, with respect to the urban forest. And I have written a couple of other stories about zelniks which do not highlight their tree affinity but still.

So I don't know. Most of these are pretty urban stories. The big novel starts out utterly rural but ends up urban. So I could call the arc Trees and the City?

on another front, the degree verification finally came. So as soon as the Dean coughs up Frank's letter, his application to Malta is complete: Ireland is next.

and on yet another front: I heard scrabbling in the walls so I think I have to call on Emma and Jason for help with the rat traps again. I am already cleaning in slow motion, so I better pick up the pace.
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Day of Porn: "Day of Porn"

ritaxis: (Default)
Tuesday, July 17th, 2012 01:37 am
So anyway, I wrote a thing for the Day of Porn, which was yesterday as of an hour and a half ago, but it's not actually all that pornographic.  It does take place in not-Prague, in the universe of not-Poland, and it involves a Zelnik.  I will explain that below the cut, and after the story, because I want to see if the story is readable without the explanation. Or at all, given that I have written most of it after midnight.
( onward to the not-porn, in not-Prague )
On another front, Truffle needs a tooth pulled and it's almost a month's wages to do it.  Fortunately, she's not in pain now.
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Itinerary for the Prague contingent. Also, foraging

ritaxis: (Default)
Sunday, July 15th, 2012 09:37 am
(In case you are one of the people who might benefit from this information)

Arriving late on the night of the 24th of July
Returning to Prague on the 19th of September
so if you wanted to meet the one or see the other again, you have almost two months to manage it.

Meanwhile I am very far behind in readying the house and attempting to write a bit of a thig for the day of porn, except it appears to be shaping up as a "mysterious appearing and disappearing curiosity shop, bookstore variety" fantasy, and maybe the porn isn't going to be the action but the Mysterious Item.  I believe the action will be fluff.. .  it's not as if my starting point was less ridiculous: I had imagined another zelenik story, which I think it still is, but I'm sure writing a lot of things about a fantasy "race" (more of a "population") that nobody else has ever heard of or cares about . . .  yet.

I had my eye on these madrone berries around the corner, once I discovered that they are delicious, but I saw these very young folks out there picking them, andthey said their aunt was going to use them but I should ask another time.  I will give it a week or so to let another round ripen (they are quite prolific), and then ask.

Meanwhile I collected about a liter and a half or two liters of pretty maroon crabapples which I was debating how to use (dry them to use like dried cranberries? They might or might not be nice like that, it's a risk . . . Sweet-pickle them the way people used to do? -- but I hated that crabapple ring garnish that used to show up on your plate all the time at certain types of restaurants when I was a kid! -- or jelly? But plain crabapple jelly is a bit boring . . .), but I have figured it out! Of course! Pepper jelly. At the store I saw no habaneros, which would have been Frank's pick, but I don't like them anyway, so the choice was serranos or jalapenos.  Serranos would have pleased Frank as they are hotter, but the jalapenos were pretty and the serranos weren't, so I went with the jalapenos, especially after I smelled them and they smelled very nice and green.  The jelly will be very red, and it will have a really complex flavor, as the crabapples have a bit of a bitter undertone and together they may taste a bit smoky.

Also, Zack loves beet greens, better than chard (they are a bit earthier and wilder tasting), but he doesn't care about beets that much, so -- I made borscht! It was lovely and I ate a lot of it.  I had a lot of radishes from Grey Bears and no turnips (which I remedied later because I'm going to do a thing with the Grey Bears cauliflower and the turnip, one of three or four different things I have to decide about), so I put radishes into the borscht and that was fine.  Radishes are more fiddly than turnips because they are smaller, but modern radishes aren't even sharp, so they sub in very well. I think old fashioned sharp radishes would sub in very well also, but the only way to test that is to grow an old fashioned variety yourself and my garden isn't back yet.
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eaten again

ritaxis: (Default)
Wednesday, March 14th, 2012 10:03 pm
Every once in a blue moon whatever word processing program I'm on gets angsty and starts telling me that it "didn't exit normally the last time it closed," i.e., it crashed -- when it didn't, actually, and in fact it not only hasn't crashed recently, it hasn't closed since the last time I saved it, and I have saved it only sentences ago: and when it does that, I ought to remember that what has actually happened is that the program has gione on a bender and it now thinks that the last several hundred words of already saved writing is new and unsaved material that is is free to jettison as soon as I tell it to shut up and get back to work. I guess what I need to do is not to either tell it to stop bugging me about Document 4, or to tell it to save Document 4 with a new name, but to quick like a bunny copy everything I have on my screen and save it to a new file. Or something.

Ah well, I didn't like the ending to the hundred years after story anyway. So I guess it's all right.

edit: I didn't lose anything this time, after all: I was looking at the unecessary backup file: the main file was completely intact.

Now I have to move the edits I made in the unnecessary backup file into the main file where they belong.
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How I hate endings

ritaxis: (Default)
Saturday, March 10th, 2012 10:03 pm
So, is the story resolution that the love interests get it on together? Or that they declare their love for one another? Or that they declare their respect for each other?

Or is the story resolution that the main guy finds purpose in life?

Or that he finds identity?
Going to walk the dog now and then sleep. I can't make the ending any good till I know which questions are the ones that matter at the end.

Also, I can't keep my eyes open.

on another front, I went to a ridiculous wedding today. All weddings are ridiculous, but this one was fun at least and it took thirteen cakes.

Anybody want to read a nearly 14K story that wants to be a little bagatelle about a fellow finding himself in a not-Central European city?
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I fail at lighthearted little romance

ritaxis: (Default)
Saturday, February 25th, 2012 06:59 pm
So, The Slash Pile Community is doing a little for-fun anthology with a "travel" theme, and I had this idea about a fellow passing through the city of Boem about a hundred years after the events in The Drummer Boy. It didn't go as planned. It's almost finished now, and it is way different from what I envisioned at first and it is also causing important changes in the novel. The changes in the novel I think are good: they make the world make more sense while also at the same time upping the magic ante. I understand what's going on with the green markings on Yanek and his sister -- I had thought they wdere just green blotches on their bellies that look like trees, but I now understand that they are actual chlorophyll-bearing cells, and that they do photosynthesize at a low level, and also that because of this there has to be markings in more prominent places as well, because it's not really going to help out your metabolism much if it's in an area that people like to keep covered even when it's sunny. So they have Trill-ish spots and stripes on the napes of their neck, because I think the area needs to be concealable, and down their backs some, and they also have the trees.

The mechanism of this -- which I do not think that Yanek's brilliant scientis sister can actually demonstrate in her time period, because of the limitations of contemporary optics and genetics theory -- is that the photosynthesizing organelles are passed from mother to child by fetal graft in the womb, rather than through the parents' chromosomes. However, there needs to be a certain array of genetic switches lined up just so, or the graft doesn't take, and furthermore, there's a certain risk to the process, and a higher rate of miscarriage. Which explains why Yanek's older brothers don't have the green stuff: they just didn't get the switches lined up. Out of eight children, two had the green stuff. That is not a Mendelian 25%, just to be clear. I don't know or care what the probabilities are in the total population. Each of the switches that work together to allow the graft to take has its own separate Mendelian genetics, and then there is the photosynthetic organism itself. I don't know or care how many of these switches are involved, or how chained they are to each other -- by that I mean, how likely it is that someone who has one of them has the others and vice versa. And who knows what's going on with the green dealies' own genetics. What makes them likely to be strong on their end? Don't know.

Meanwhile, the little story? ends up having neo-nazis in it. I don't even know how that happened.

spoiler: they live, they get together, they may have a future together.
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