Tot-up Tuesday

[desperance]

God, can it really be Tuesday again already? I was just thinking "Gah! I hate this scene, this morning's work and yesterday's, I just want to tear it all up and start again. Again. And it'll play hell with the Tuesday word-count, again..." and then I realised, this was Tuesday so I might as well do the wordcounting now, before I start hacking and slaying the words. That'll keep the count clean, even if the desk gets mired in gore.

So, where are we? We are here:

18,408 / 150,000 (12.3%)

or, in my preferred page-count

59 / 450 (13.1%)

which is 5,489 new words since last week, which is of course pathetic. And yes, I have been ill; and yes, I have been proofreading all week; and yes, I have spent one afternoon running a workshop; and yes, I have been away for the weekend; and yes, it's still pathetic.

And, as I say, I want to tear much of it up and start again. Again. We are all of us in the gutter, but some of us are face-down in the filth.

*flounces off, in search of laudanum, absinthe and a green carnation*

Comments

[davidbarnett.livejournal.com]

Not. A. Bloody. Word.

Really need to get moving on this if I'm going to hit this end-of-the-year deadline...

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

I'll bite.

What's the carnation for?

[desperance.livejournal.com]

It's an Oscar Wilde thing. I am known to have a Thing for Oscar; indeed, I have a whole unwritten novel which is strictly a contemporary thriller about parenthood, but is known far and wide as 'the Oscar novel', and is wittily subtitled 'The Ballad of Reading Wilde'. I have a friend who used to bring me a green carnation before every gig.

I love 'em because they are an artifice of nature, the natural process of a natural product being utterly manipulated by humankind. Why Oscar loved 'em is of course more complicated. There is this:

"The sign of a green carnation worn in a lapel became popularly associated with Wilde and his crowd of friends. When asked what the carnation signified, Wilde responded: "Nothing whatever, but that is just what nobody will guess." The hysteria surrounding the green carnation and what it might mean is entertainingly depicted in R. S. Hichens' novel, The Green Carnation , published just before Wilde's trials. In the novel, Mr. Amarinth, only loosely disguised as Oscar Wilde, is characterized as the high priest of "the philosophy to be afraid of nothing." Though the novel ambivalently probes the meanings latent in Wilde's "surface of symbols," the novel itself was interpreted as documentary rather than fictional by the reading public, a fact which only contributed to the fury around Wilde at the time of his trials."

If that helps any.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

It does. Shiny!

I learned something today!

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Department of gratuitous information: the green dye which made this possible was invented by E. Nesbit's brother.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

And she says he hadn't done at all well? When he had done something so wonderfully useful with his life, as to give Oscar a thing he could be epigrammatic about? Bah!