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I use LoudTwitter to summarize random things, good things, and cool links into one daily post. If you're a LoudTwitter hater and you run Firefox, you can use this greasemonkey script to remove LoudTwitter posts from your friends page, or run this script in your code.

Small snowflakes like ashes floating down to blanket everything, and they say snow emergency sometime, maybe today, maybe tomorrow, it's a slow storm and hard to predict. Bowl of bread crusts on the kitchen counter to throw out for the crows, but if the snow covers them before the birds get there, they'll freeze and wait until the spring thaw when things with beaks or claws or mandibles will take them away. Going in early to downtown to pick up earplugs and Vicodin and Tylenol. What a list--I feel old.

Doing story submissions today, and I paid attention to some numbers. These are since I switched to using my own spreadsheets.

Date started: January 2006
Stories I'm currently tracking: 41 (including the Lost Story)
Submissions: 108
Acceptances: 11

Now, that's not an entirely accurate reflection of the statistics, since the acceptance rate has increased nicely recently, but still! Agh. I need to write more. I need to submit more.

Gah. Husband just commented that I've been listening to things louder recently. And I noticed that I've been asking people to repeat themselves more. Maybe it's true that not being allowed to wear headphones at my current job location is having negative effects on my hearing. Well, it's only another two weeks standard--but then I'll be floating after that. I dunno. Thinking of actually bringing it up as an issue to HR.

02/04/10, Thursday, slept in really late, and 02/05/10, Friday, worked the morning at Spyhouse with fayde.

"Ekaterina and the Firebird" Writing Log



Words typed so far: 3,759
Overused word: papa
Gratuitous word: leshii (Russian forest spirit)
Challenge(s): Erm, getting the thing written in time? Making a transgressive subject like gender identity feel like it fits in a historical story?
Which line is it anyways?The remembered joy of flirting on the night of her seventeenth birthday died like a rabbit crushed between a wolf's jaws. (It's too long, but I still like it. May keep it anyway. At least the rabbit part.)
Researched: What haven't I researched! Russian name conventions, and names. Forest spirits. Clothing. Food. Types of forest. Songbirds. Bergamot. Brandy.
Notes: Next up is the main religion scene. That should be an interesting balancing act.
Other writingy stuff:
* Posted writing log, freewriting
* Read Critters newsletter and updated market list from it.

"A Madness of Angels: or, The Resurrection of Matthew Swift" is one of those books that immediately made me look up the author to see if she'd written anything else I could get my hands on. (The answer, sadly, is no.) It's gritty urban fantasy with some literary flourishes, including the most interesting use of pronouns in a first-person POV that I've ever seen. The main character is either Matthew Swift, a neon-lights-old-newspaper-and-pigeon-droppings city magician murdered a few years ago and brought back to life by the blue electric angels that sing through the telephone wires, or the blue electric angels possessing the corpse of a dead man. Your choice. Either way, he really wants to take vengeance on whoever killed Matthew Swift--and whoever brought him back. Oh, and other powerful magicians around the city are being killed in ghastly ways. If you like Jim Butcher or Simon R. Green's Nightside series, read this.

So, I have some trouble telling people apart. It's a standing joke at our house that I think "all white people look alike" (I have this problem slightly less with people whose skin tone has a wider range). I frequently confuse those around me when I try to identify which movies I've seen actors in--almost always I agglomerate a couple of actors.

However! Today it's not just me. It really is the Day of the Doppelgangers.

This morning at Spyhouse, I saw what I first thought was a good friend. fayde assured me that it was not. I am still not wholly convinced.

( See if you 'recognize' her. )

And then in the skyway doing a courier run, I saw my mother-in-law. Ten years younger, 30 pounds lighter, but the resemblance was uncanny. I stopped and stared. It rather disconcerted her, I'm afraid.

...I wonder what they're here for?

Cw1: "My mom's feet are size 5."

Cw2: "My mom's are size 6."

Cw1: "Maybe your feet get smaller as you get older."

Cw2: "..."

The other day, a little girl (maybe 4 years old?) wanted to stand on the seat in the front of the bus, where it would be ridiculously easy to fall forward and crack your head open. Another bus rider said she was surprised the little girl wasn't old enough to know about good ideas and bad ideas, which she explained to the little girl for the next 5 minutes, with reinforcement from the mother.

#

Last night, a woman got on the bus with two little girls, not actually her daughters. She sat them down and went to the front of the bus and started fussing with trying to find the money for the bus fare--this took more than 5 minutes. It was ridiculous. Meanwhile, the littlest girl starts fussing about wanting her mommy and works her way up to a full blown crying fit. So I jump in to distract her, babbling about anything to keep her from fussing. And it works.

It's not well-written. It's really not. It's written in a basic style. Things happen because the author decided they would, not because they make any sense. And I am not pleased with what they did to that baby Wookie!

And yet...I read the whole thing. Because it is strangely compelling. Because it is Zombies...In....SPAAAACE! And not just any space, but Star WarsTM space.

02/03/2010, Wednesday, near-full day at day job
* Posted freewriting, writing log
* Wrote 2 1/2 pgs. longhand on "Ekaterina etc" on the bus. Allowing myself to write out-of-order as the inspiration hits me (when the inspiration doesn't hit me, I write from point A to point B, and sometimes inspiration sneaks up on me) makes putting this together interesting.

x-post fb/lj--

My current, consistent (okay, consistent-ish--most of the time, but not always) schedule has me at the day job afternoons until 6 PM. This means two major things (in addition to a host of minor things like, "Oh lord, I hope the roomba didn't hurl itself off the stairs while I was gone," and, "I'm so pleased City Center lets people waiting for the bus hover inside by the door and doesn't kick us out into the cold," and, "I have to figure out my optimum schedule again?"):

1. Cooking is a problem. I'm the main cook, I don't get home until 7, which means food wouldn't be ready until 7:30-8:00, and I have a husband who practically self-destructs if he isn't fed immediately upon arriving home. Sometimes he has been cooking, but he's got a really limited repertoire, about where I was at 6 years ago. Sometimes he eats before I even get home, which is great for marital bonding. Sometimes I have been using the slow cooker. But here's the thing. Most of the slow-cooker recipes I have kinda suck. They're from a midwestern cookbook that's all about mixing together stuff in cans, especially canned cream-of-stuff, and the results are not great. So I ask you--what are your favorite slow cooker recipes and/or cookbooks? Bonus points if it's not soup.

2. Mornings are for working on writingy things. Right now, that means lots of editing. I can edit in company just fine. So if anybody'd like to socialize by co-existing in a coffee shop and working on projects, let me know. I'd love to hang out in a coffee shop with friends some morning.

02/02/2010, Tuesday
* Posted writing log, freewriting, NanoWri.
* Updated market listing with dead markets.
* Typed up more of "Ekaterina and the Firebird," doing research as I went along to fill in some bits. In 1700s Russia, men dressed in coast and waistcoats and breeches and stockings! Women wore no underwear! Kvass, a moderately fermented drink, was the most common "non-alcoholic" drink! (And in modern Russia, kvass is making coca-cola rethink their product line.)

The beginning of "Ekaterina and the Firebird:"

Ekaterina's seventeenth birthday ball would be completely overshadowed by the adventures that followed: seeing the Firebird and chasing it into Chyorniy Forest, being treed by wolves, nearly splitting open Nikolai's skull with a tree branch, discovering that everything she believed herself to be was a lie, and being told the truth about the family curse. She did not know that yet, however. As she bid their guests farewell, she was filled with a mixture of elation at the success of her ball and sadness that nothing more interesting would happen to her for years.

Now that's what I call a first sentence.

A man on the bus, in his early 50s. He was wearing a leopard-print fur shirt, a leather and fur coat, a huge gold chain, heavy rings on both his hands, and--yes--a hat with a twelve-inch feather in it. Pimping it old-skool!

02/01/2010, Monday, full day at day job
* Posted writing log, freewriting
* Wrote 2 pages longhand on "Ekaterina and the Firebird"
* Consolidated online and typed-from-notes-so-far "Ekaterina" and typed up several more pages. Tried to do some research.** Swore bitterly at said failed research. Learned to hate cyrillic. Was very happy with Aardvark.


**Trying to find equivalent Russian words, in the English alphabet, is not super-easy. What is black, as in Black Forest^? Chyorniy. How do you say good morning? Dobraye utro. What's a Russian songbird that would be in a deciduous forest in late autumn? Shegol (goldfinch)--that one required Aardvark. What's Russian for "Dad"? Papa. Okay, that last is pretty neat.

^ Black forest was the widespread folk name for oak, birch, aspen and other deciduous forests, especially in the southern and southwestern part of the country. This name arose from the sharp contrast of the black silhouettes of the leafless trees in winter against the white snow. There is also the concept of the red forest, which is applied mainly to light coniferous forests of pines which have a reddish bark. It is also often associated with coniferous forests in general because of their beauty in all seasons of the year (the Russian word krasniy, which means red, is used here in its old meaning of beautiful, like Red Square in Moscow). In contemporary forestry literature these terms are no longer used, but they were widely applied in earlier times.
- http://www.forest.ru/eng/publications/history/02.html (and isn't that just the most evocative thing?)

01/31/2010, Sunday
* Posted freewriting, writing log, NanoWri
* Read various writing feeds, plus Duotrope, 3 WritersMarket, 2 FundsforWriters, Publishers Lunch, and 2 FFWSmallMarkets newsletters, and updated market list from them.
* Submitted "Look Back to Keep Her" to Pedestal Magazine. This story was formerly known as "Dining on a Dead Girl's Dime," which, while hella catchy, set up totally the wrong feel for the story. Maybe that was a problem? I do not know. This one hints more at what it is.
* Submitted "They'll Seal Any Leak, Guaranteed!" to OG's Speculative Fiction.
* Added Critters' "things we want to see in the future" forum to my "Futures" document.
* The Much Maligned Adverb: http://blog.writersdigest.com/norules/2009/10/20/TheMuchMalignedAdverb.aspx
* You May Be a Bestseller on Tralfamadore: http://blog.nathanbransford.com/2010/01/guest-blog-week-you-may-be-bestseller.html

Did you know that there are US firebirds? True fax.

firebird n. U.S. Dial. any of several small birds having bright red or orange plumage, esp. the Baltimore oriole.

From this, two conclusions:
1) myths live among us, and
2) standardized spellings of translated fairytales are hard to find. Some places one word, some two, generally capitalized, but not always. Harrumph. So it will be "Firebird."

01/30/2010, Saturday
* Began typing up the part of "Ekaterina and the Firebird" that has been written longhand so far.

01/29/2010, Friday, full day at job + evening social engagement
* 1 1/2 pg. longhand on "Ekaterina and the Firebird."

01/28/2010, Thursday, half day at day job + overslept
* Posted freewriting, writing log, NanoWri.
* Prepped Vicesteed ch. 26 for edits. It's 3 pages long! This should be quick! And only 53,000 more words to go and I'm done with Vicesteed....
* Wrote 2 pgs longhand on "Ekaterina and the Fire Bird."

nemoren pointed me toward http://www.casttv.com/, which has a ridiculously large selection of full television episodes online, much larger than hulu.com (although the video quality is lower, I think). I was delighted because this meant I could catch up on the last couple of Criminal Minds episodes that I missed. Yay!

Then I found out it has all the episodes of the most recent season of Dexter. Danger, Will Robinson, danger! But...but...I have other stuff I should be doing.