Thursday, November 8, 2007  

I went to the gym yesterday morning, and lifted various things and then lowered them back down again, and pretended to run and/or bicycle, and then I went into the locker room and took a shower and came out again and dried off and got dressed and was all ready to go off to work, but my shoes weren't there!

Now when I go to the club, I wear white socks and sneakers, and I put my sandals (this is all assuming there's no snow on the ground, or at least not much) into my gym bag with my work clothes, and at the locker room I stick the gym bag into a locker and take out the sandals and put them on the floor in front of the locker out of habit and to remind me which locker my stuff is in.

But yesterday when I came back from the shower my sandals were nowhere to be seen! I looked all around on the floor of the locker room, looked up surreptitiously at people's faces to see if they looked like someone having guilty feelings from having stolen a pair of sandals, make frustrated noises, and was (I think) about to like go upstairs and ask if they had a lost-and-found, or if there were criminal shoe theives on the premises, or what, when it occurred to me to wonder if in fact I had today actually brought my sandals with me and put them on the ground in front of the locker like I always do.

And of course then I remembered that I hadn't, and that they were sitting comfortably back at home, perhaps wondering what had become of me, and if it had maybe snowed or something.

Also, my cellphone was out of batteries.

A very kind reader writes:

Never mind the riding for now, the novel is yummy yummy yummy.

Not sure about the yumminess yet, but it's definitely longer!

End of Day Six: 6,011
End of Day Seven: 8,040
Today's Goal: 10,000 (woot!)

Speaking of which, my remote writing buddy Diane is this year NaNoWriMoing for Charity, which is very cool and wired; so go give some money to the Office of Letters and Light, if only because it has a really cool name.

(Oh, and I did some of yesterday's procrastination by rereading Take Good Care of Yourself and Others; it was actually pretty good. I was pleasantly surprised!)

Tuesday, November 6, 2007  

A reader writes:

Yes, please write a novel.

Well in fact I am! And even here it is! Such as it is.

Compared to prior years it's going pretty badly, actually. *8)

End of Day Three: 0 (I sort of forgot...)
End of Day Four: 2,541
End of Day Five: 4,092
Currently: 5,338
Today's Goal: 6,000 (being easy on myself)

So given that I forgot all about it for the first three days, we won't take six thousand words by the end of day six as an inadequate thousand words per day for a thirty-day month; instead we'll take days four through six as three out of (oh, say) twenty-five days, in which an average of two thousand words per day gets us neatly to the magical fifty thousand just in time.

Here's an excerpt just for fun:

Not only is the room too well-appointed, it is also too large. He frowns at the walls, at the far corner, then turns and goes outside, and surveys that side of the house from the yard. The only window is a small frosted-glass thing that must open on the padlocked closet, and the only other opening is a vent-slit that must open into a crawlspace above the hallway. The wall is, he is certain, not wide enough, not nearly wide enough, to hold the room he was just standing in.

He has no measuring tape, but the store half a mile away does, and he returns to measure. On the outside, the wall is twenty-eight feet long. On the inside, the hallway is six feet across, the utility room ten feet deep, and the too-large room is fully fifteen feet. At least three feet too large, and really more like five given the thickness of the walls that he hasn't measured.

He goes outside and measures again, comes inside and measures again, and nothing has changed.

He goes again to the convenience store, to get lunch, and to get a hand drill.

I'm having my usual problem of slipping between tenses, and my usual wordcount-aware wordy diction. I'm also starting to cheat by slipping in snippets of text that come up in the story. Happy November! *8)

And finally, here's Spennix on a giant mechanical chicken: