Me, me, me

[desperance]

It's my birthday, and I shall do as I please. Including getting stray and unexpected things pushed through my letterbox at unexpected times; this pleases me inordinately.

I was up here checking my e-mails when the posty-noises came. But the post had been already, so we went to look, Barry and I: and behold! Birthday gifts. Little kitchen gadgets - a pastry brush, a pastry mat, baby whisks, like that - and a newspaper. A newspaper! On the very day I'm allowed to take the time to read a newspaper, do the crossword, do the Su Doku, everything! Oh, joy...

So I'm going to do that, over More Coffee. I might go into town and drift around the shops, making-believe I have money to spend; but it's windy out there and I'm old now, so I might just not bother. I might stay home and read a book. Or go to the pub and read a book. Or I might go to the pub with some work, but only if I really really want to.

Work: last night, I finished the first draft synopsis for 'The Dragon-in-Chains' (I'm starting to wonder about those hyphens; do we prefer 'The Dragon in Chains', O my LJ?) and its sequels. That's the basic plotting (well, fading later into story-arc) for three novels, plucked from nowhere in a week. Don't ask me how that happens, it just does. 'Course, the books as written will start at variance and move wildly further from this laid track; books aren't trains, to run where and only where you tell them. If I were a transport buff, I would stretch that metaphor (is it a metaphor, when you say one thing isn't something else? which it conspicuously and absolutely isn't?), and books would become, oh, something wildly unlikely and free, hot-air balloons or some such, and the whole thing would go 'poof!' and collapse under its own weight of absurdity.

So: because I have missed word meters, my own and other people's, this last month or so; and because I wrote c 300,000 words last year, which was almost unparallel'd; and because I know that a peak is not a target, and it's stupid to set goals that are too ambitious, but I'm a writer and so by definition must enjoy the whole palate of tastes that come with falling short - the bitterness of failure, the sourness of defeat, the salt of tears, the sweet of rot, and, oh, something for umami - therefore I am aiming at no less than that this year. So far, then, the year-to-date:

3,841 / 300,000 (1.3%)

Or, in pages:

12 / 1,000 (1.2%)

...and we'll see how far that goes. I won't post these often, but at the moment I don't have a big project to pursue, so it seems handy to have a counter that will pull together all the little stuff. Not that there will be much this month: work for the next week or two is revising last year's urban-fantasy novel, and then a redraft of the play, neither of which will yield countable pages. I shall start by falling way, way behind my target. Sigh...

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[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

The oddness of Jade Man's Skin is nothing to do with the absence of article: The Jade Man's Skin would be equally odd. Odd enough to be extremely intriguing...