Cultivator
Universe

Eyes of Infistar word count: 59535

First time I've made a weekly quota since April, but here it is, only Thursday, and officially I'm done for the week.

Secondly…
Number One Son has been reading Cantata in Coral and Ivory and he's been chuckling, and reading his favorite lines aloud to unwary passer-byes, just like he would if it was a Terry Pratchett book, or a Bujold book. ****glow****

Word count for Friday: 35898

I actually did more work on Friday than that shows. Firstly, I did a bit of working out what was really going on, and secondly I took a couple bits I didn't like out of the draft, then I wrote a couple hundred words.

Monday's Word Count: 35800

Friday's Word Count: 34502

I made the week by 26 words. Cutting it close, perhaps, but done.
I have managed to pick up the pace of the action a bit, and I think that's good, I'll probably have to go back to the earlier stuff and ratchet it up a bit, but that's an exersize for the revision stage, right now I just have to get some kind of story down, so it's available to be fixed later.

I have been watching the Lord of the Ring movie commentaries. Movie making documentaries has always interested me, because the stuff they talk about, often sounds a lot like the stuff that I think about as a writer, but they think about the same kind of things several times over: telling the story in dialog, telling it in pictures, telling it in music, telling it in sound…

All I have is words.

And yet all that effort that went into the Lord of the Rings movies, all that creativity and time spent and all that was in an attempt to prove worthy of Tolkien's words — a humbling and inspiring thought.

Thursdays Word Count: 32669

I made the quota yesterday by over 200 words, but it was on my second effort, and I didn't finish until after lunch.
Not only that, but with a short day on Monday, and taking Wednesday off to do crits I'm still 1807 words short of the week, and I'm supposed to be at an SCA Demo all tomorrow.

I guess I better get started.

I seem to have lost an entry.
Monday's Word Count: 30165
Tuesday's Word Count: 31466

I am supposed to work on crits today, and I really need to, but I am soooooo tired!

I FINALLY got to see the Return of the King yesterday, you see. Didn't get home until after eleven, didn't get to sleep until who knows when.
I've got errands that NEED to be run today, too.
But it was worth it.

Friday's Word Count: 29476
Words for the week: 5525

Thursday's Word Count: 28891

That's 1718 words. I've almost made my week, but I'm not managing anything even resembling consistent output this time around, am I?

Let's see, I started in February, and I'm supposed to finish in August. At the current average rate of writing, I will have gotten about 70 000 words done by then. Somehow I don't think I'm going to be able to finish the darn thing in 70 000 words. Bleh!
Must do better.
Must avoid coming down with bad infection. (Hah! How do I manage that?)

Tuesday's Word Count: 27173

I didn't write today, because I've decided that if I need to catch up on crits that didn't happen over the weekend, Wednesday is a better day than Monday. (At least, that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.) So I worked on my RFDR instead.

I also picked up a couple more “got it's” for Cantata today. Yay! That means I'm definitely doing better than the last draft, (not that there isn't still a lot of room for improvement, but it would be a bummer if my first set of revisions had done nothing at all). Everyone is being nicely consistent in pointing out, A) a couple typo type errors I somehow missed [wince!], and B) things which confused them, so this next revision is going to be a *lot* easier than the last one. (And that's probably yet another indication that the last rewrite was aimed in the right direction.)

So now the only problem is that with all this helpful feedback, I might actually get it into submitable shape, and I hate the whole process of submitting things.

But, as Patricia C. Wrede keeps telling rec.arts.sf.composition, “Editors never do house to house searches for publishable manuscripts.”

Got back to work on Art stuff yesterday. (I'm getting tired of hand sewing, I want my sewing machine fixed already.)
I'm supposed to be public beta-ing DAZ3D's “Studio” but it runs like molasses on my machine. Reminds me of the first time I tried out the Poser Demo… three machines ago. Maybe I'll actually be able to use the darn thing on my *next* computer upgrade, it does have some awfully sweet features, (although that 'panes snap to fill all available space' thing is *not* working.)

PS.
Scene from my Talking With Winds now viewable at both my Writing website and my Weaving Dreamscapes website.

Monday's Word Count: 26242

2291 words for Monday. When Bambi and Algernon start sniping at each other the words just flow. Now if only I could find the right dynamic for Serena and her Hworill Prince…

I've gotten comments on Cantata from 4 critters now. Two people who “got it” by the end of the first chapter, and two whom I lost completely. 50% would be an improvement from the last set of critiques, but how many people who got lost didn't bother to reply at all?

At least I've got a nice list of places where I'm being too subtle in my explanations (especially vocabularly-wise), so I know where to apply a bigger cluebat. As for the pov thingy, I just can't figure out how to be more obvious than to have one character explain to another what is going on. (Boyd says, 'You need to accept that some people are just never going to get it.')

I'm thinking of translating the name of Ikhsior's ship to make one (or two, someone put it on their list twice because it showed up in the text twice I assume) fewer “strange terms” for people to deal with, and the rest I can hopefully just make a little clearer.