Paksworld

Another day of travel, another 2000+ words added to Book III.    Maybe I should live on the train?   No, not really.   But it focuses my mind something wonderful–no phone, no interruptions (well, meals and such but nothing else) and the words come.   Scenery, too.  And interesting people when I do come up for air.  (Little do they know, the writer is watching…and listening…bwah-hah-hah-hah!)

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I’m now in final packing mode and soon to leave for the city to do a few chores and then catch the train.   Posting here is likely to be spotty at best though I should be able to report how much I wrote on the train by sometime Thursday.  That’s if my brain stays connected to my fingers, which given the number of times I’ve gone from one room to another to find a specific item and been distracted by something else, is presently in doubt.

Convention schedule reminder here. For those who can’t make my autograph session on Friday at 4 pm, I’m happy to sign at other times as long as we’re not in someone’s way or I’m not rushing to something else (and that includes the restroom.)   For those who can’t make any of my program items, you’re just going to have to hunt for me…sorry.

…The Writing Magic, that is.    After some slogging days of making quota but not feeling the thrill (“But I’d rather sit out by the water garden and watch dragonflies…”)  I started a scene on Tuesday that grew…and picked the right place to stop for the day.

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I will be at Dragon*Con this year  (Sept 3-6, Atlanta GA.)  Schedule:

Friday: 4 pm Autograph Session

Saturday: 1 pm “Hour with Elizabeth Moon”

Saturday: 7 pm  Dragon*Con Awards Banquet (not a good place to chat. LOUD!)

Sunday :  1 pm “Delphic Oracle” (panel storytelling game)

Sunday :  4 pm  “Science Fiction and Politics”

Sunday: 7 pm  “Showcase: Elizabeth Moon

Monday:  11:30 am “The New Amazons”

Monday: 4 pm  “The Future of Fantastic Fiction”

Would be fun to meet up with Paksworld fans attending Dragon*Con somewhere in those four days.     I will be bringing along some unusual (one at least utterly unique) items to give away, probably in a random drawing, maybe after a contest.  Depends on responses here and there.

(And of course I’ll be glad to see fans of the other books and series as well–all are welcome.)

2641 words today, not bad for a Monday.   Especially a Monday that included a visit to a friend whose mother died over the weekend, a trip to the town 20 miles away to get some much-needed immunizations (tetanus was way overdue),  some more set-up work on a computer (changing one suite of software for another–always SUCH fun.)   And baking additional bread (but not making the dough today–thawing out the lumps of frozen dough from yesterday, because the larger loaf from yesterday went to the friend whose mother had died, along with a couple of quarts of homemade soup.)

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It’s been an interesting week in the writer-as-worker world.   I did in fact meet and even exceed my weekly quota, topping 2000 words/day and ending up with a total for the five days of just over 12,000 words.  Two of the days produced really good stuff.   Three of the days produced more pedestrian stuff, but enough forward motion through the plot that there’s something to work with in revision.  Two of the days (including one that turned out very well in the end, and one that turned out OK in the end) were very, very difficult…to get started, to continue, to drag out the task to the end of the day (which was late.)

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As if you didn’t know that already.    But last year’s goof (not recognized as a goof at the time)  has made the last week….difficult.   I’m swiping a post I made over at SFF.net  so I don’t have to write the embarrassing thing twice, but being a writer, I had to edit and revise it. Read the rest of this entry »

We moved the old drafting table over from the other house (had been my mother’s after she moved up here,  then guest-house, then son’s house for a couple of years) to what is now the spare bedroom in this house.  Only it’s not going to be a spare bedroom–it’s going to be a drawing/painting/graphics room.  The old drafting table, now well over 60 years old, is pretty beat-up, so I’m using a piece of plexiglass on top of the (rapidly delaminating) original maple veneer top.  The tilt mechanism doesn’t work anymore–my mother stabilized it with a pair of extra “legs” that fixed it at one tilt.   (Yes, I could maybe get a newer used one, or a new one, but this is the drafting table I remember from early childhood.   A “don’t touch” zone that I violated only a few times…most notably the time I used my mother’s big T-square as a hobby-horse.  Once.  The repercussions were convincing.)

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Thanks to the packing and preparation for moving M- into an apartment in the city, writing time has remained minimal this week…but some progress is happening, at least in my head.   I hope and expect to have a sort of microburst of writing when he’s installed, writing it all down in sequence rather than rough notes.

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Real Life has been interesting this past week.  As in “May you live in interesting times” interesting, but not REALLY interesting times.    The interestingness divides into health issues (about which I will be reticent, except to say that two of three people in the family have some and medical and dental appointments are ongoing)  and “organization of life, in light of changes.”

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