The cold, it bites us

Great gods and little gods, but it is cold out there. Coldy-cold-cold. The sun shines full on the frost and the frost don't melt: that kind of cold. I have a water-butt in my back yard, and it's not just frozen over; by the way the sides are bulging, I think it's frozen all the way through. A three-foot ice cube. And this in a yard that is sheltered and south-facing and rarely subject to frost.

Still, I have braved the cold. I have shopped. When I have written one more page, I shall make bigos, because I can. I could have bought bigos off the shelf, but mine will be much nicer than the stuff in the jar (though I did buy more sauerkraut. I do not make sauerkraut. I looked into it one time, but it seems to be something that needs to be made in industrial quantities, which, no).

Also, I bought litter trays. How do the boys break so many litter trays - rumbustious pooing? My dainty girls never did this...

Also, while we're on the subject of "how do the boys...?" - there was a clatter from the kitchen last night. This is not unusual, but I didn't recognise the quality of the clatter, so I had to go and check.

It may be the last of its kind, but my cooker has a raised grill, which would be eye-level on a much shorter person. The pan slides in and out on runners that hold it there; if you want to take it out altogether to clean it, you have to push it in and lift it bodily and then slide it out, so the runners disengage from their tracks. Yes?

The grill pan was lying on the kitchen floor. I don't know why they did that, but more to the point I have no idea how they did it. Teamwork, one on each handle? But you have to grip the handles and lift...

They may have evolved removable thumbs.

Status

One page before coffee and shopping, two since. Okey-doke. I can't go to the Lit & Phil - woe, woe! cursed be Sundays! - but I have still completed my morning's ration. But then, it was fun this morning. I had this new character walk in last night, and he needed exploring. (It is a function, of course, of work-sans-outline, that new characters will just stroll in and demand to be explored; I note, though, that they are doing this later and later. The stand-out example from Outremer is Sieur Anton, who turns up about chapter three and then moulds the whole trilogy about himself, to the point where it is impossible to imagine or remember what the story was meant to be without him; in Bridge of Dreams/River of the World, it's Djago, who turns up towards the end of vol one. And here I am right in the final throes of vol two in this series, and suddenly...)

Oh, and speaking of work-sans-outline, I did just happen to glance through the synopsis I'd put together to sell this series. Umm. Book one stays fairly close, more or less. Book two has now departed so radically from the estimate that there is frankly no book three left at all, or at least no hope of steering back towards book three as described. Eek. Anybody got a spare plot, at all...?

Status (2)

Still only three pages down, and I appear to be going to the pub.

Um, whoops?

Writerly meme

Lifted from Charlie ab initio, via Bear and suricattus and others:

* Age when I decided I wanted to be a writer: 5.
* Age when I got my hands on a typewriter and taught myself to use it: 13.
* Age when I wrote my first novel: 22 (for values of "wrote" that include "finished").
* Novels written between age 15 and age 22: uncounted. Unfinished.
* Age when I first submitted a short story to a magazine: 15.
* Thickness of file of rejection slips prior to first story sale: not very.
* Age when I sold my first short story: 18.
* Age when I first came close to selling a novel: n/a (due to unfinishedness).
* Age when I first sold a novel: 22 (a commission).
* Age when I next wrote a saleable novel: 28.
* Age when a short story was first shortlisted for a significant award: 32.
* Age when I first won a significant award: 39.
* Age now: 49.
* Number of books sold: a couple of dozen. Depends how you count.
* Number of titles in print: not so many.
* Number of titles fallen out of print: quite a few.
Consider this an LJ-meme: if you write professionally, feel free to post your own equivalent of this list. (Obviously you'll need to customize it to track your career path -- but you get the idea.)

Seven pages a day

Pages: seven. (And lordy, there's a surprise; these mid-afternoon pub visits are a killer, ordinarily. But I was right at the end of the week, right at the end of a section: I got there, just about.)

Words: 1920

Zukotou:

129,413 / 125,000 (103.5%)

And the girl-no-longer-disguised-as-a-woman has met the Crippled Man Whose Significance We Do Not Know and the pirate-no-longer-disguised-as-a-pirate. Finally. And the lamplight flickers in the torture cell, and now can we move on? Please?

In other news: well, that worked. Fifty pages in seven days, exactly. And no, I have not finished the book, not nohow. Nobody who knows me will be surprised.

The big question is, do I carry on regardless? Do I aim for the same again, another seven-page-a-day extravaganza? It worked this week, but I had no other engagements at the week's start; I'm starting this with several. Which I might manage to work around, but... Well, I dunno. Having an absolute target helps, but only so long as I can keep to it. As soon as I have a failure day, who can say? And do I want to risk it...?