K.C. Shaw's Blog, page 21
April 7, 2011
Reasons for shorts
I wrote a short story today! It's less than 900 words and not all that great, sure, but it's a real live short story, the first I've written since the end of December. I wrote it for two reasons.
Reason one: I'm 85,000 words into Bloodhound but I've painted myself into a corner. Our heroine Cam is on her way with a friend to rescue her vampire-hunting colleagues from a few hundred vampires who have them besieged. I have no earthly idea how two people will make a difference in this case. Everything I think of smacks of deus ex machina. So while I'm frantic to keep writing, I have no idea what I'm going to write, and I thought I should drop back and work on a short instead. It hasn't helped.
Reason two: I got the edits this week for "Antler and Eye," which will appear in the Leather, Denim & Steel anthology from Pill Hill Press really soon. That was the story I wrote at the end of December, and I was impressed at its quality when I read it over. It's not perfect, but it was a lot better than I remembered. It also made me want to write another short story.
As I've complained before, I'm not all that good at writing short. I'm a novelist. But short stories really are worth writing, if I can dredge up ideas for them.
Reason one: I'm 85,000 words into Bloodhound but I've painted myself into a corner. Our heroine Cam is on her way with a friend to rescue her vampire-hunting colleagues from a few hundred vampires who have them besieged. I have no earthly idea how two people will make a difference in this case. Everything I think of smacks of deus ex machina. So while I'm frantic to keep writing, I have no idea what I'm going to write, and I thought I should drop back and work on a short instead. It hasn't helped.
Reason two: I got the edits this week for "Antler and Eye," which will appear in the Leather, Denim & Steel anthology from Pill Hill Press really soon. That was the story I wrote at the end of December, and I was impressed at its quality when I read it over. It's not perfect, but it was a lot better than I remembered. It also made me want to write another short story.
As I've complained before, I'm not all that good at writing short. I'm a novelist. But short stories really are worth writing, if I can dredge up ideas for them.
April 4, 2011
What we talk about when we talk about ducks
This is what I've been doing lately.
That's the culvert and the little connector ditch I blogged about recently. You can't tell from the picture, but it's raining. Also, if you look closely there are two rubber duckies floating down the rainwater.
Because that's my new hobby.
Mom has a little table next to the front door, and on it are two small bowls, much cracked-and-repaired, from Ming dynasty China. They happen to be precisely the right size for small rubber duckies.
After I came in this evening from racing my rubber duckies, Mom walked by the bowls and stopped to stare at them. She said, "This may be the first time any Ming bowls anywhere have been used to hold rubber duckies." And I said, "But not the last time."
March 30, 2011
The words, dear god the words!
This weekend I decided it was way, way past time for me to catch up on my typing. I've been doing a lot of writing longhand lately, and it was piling up. I hadn't even finishing typing up what was in my old notebook and I was halfway through a new one.
So I made a real effort to type everything over the weekend. I wrote down my starting wordcount so I could see how many words I'd written longhand. But I didn't finish the typing over the weekend, so every night this week I've typed some more--not helped by the fact that I kept writing in that same notebook during the day.
I caught up tonight. My starting wordcount for Bloodhound: 60,853. Ending wordcount now that everything is typed up: 75,929.
Holy crap. No wonder that took so long to type.
So I made a real effort to type everything over the weekend. I wrote down my starting wordcount so I could see how many words I'd written longhand. But I didn't finish the typing over the weekend, so every night this week I've typed some more--not helped by the fact that I kept writing in that same notebook during the day.
I caught up tonight. My starting wordcount for Bloodhound: 60,853. Ending wordcount now that everything is typed up: 75,929.
Holy crap. No wonder that took so long to type.
March 27, 2011
R.I.P. Diana Wynne Jones
I was twelve years old and my family had just arrived at a motel for the night: me, my little brother, our grandparents, and an uncle, all of us on the way to the beach. I'd seen the beach before, but not since I was three. Our motel was in North Carolina somewhere and we didn't really need to stop--it's a ten-hour drive from East Tennessee to the Carolina coast--but our grandparents liked to leave early and stay overnight on the way so that we'd arrive at our beach rental house around noon instead of late at night and tired.
I remember being excited that the ground next to the parking lot was sandy. We were almost there!
And I remember lying on my bed in the hotel room and opening a new book I'd brought with me for the trip: Dogsbody by Diana Wynne Jones. Within a few sentences, I'd forgotten all about the sandy ground outside, the beach tomorrow, the argument I'd had with my grandmother about my toothbrush (I'd forgotten it and she wasn't happy with me). I was Sirius, a godlike creature punished for someone else's crime by being banished into the body of a dog on Earth, nearly drowned at birth, and rescued by a girl in nearly as much trouble as I was.
It was my first introduction to Diana Wynne Jones's books. Since then I've read almost everything she's written. Dogsbody remains one of my favorites, together with A Tale of Time City, The Homeward Bounders, Deep Secret, Dark Lord of Dirkholm, and all the Chrestomanci books. I don't know any writer who could capture a child's way of thinking quite so perfectly. Her books are endlessly inventive and lively, funny and tragic.
Diana Wynne Jones died yesterday. It almost feels like something bright has vanished from the world.
I remember being excited that the ground next to the parking lot was sandy. We were almost there!
And I remember lying on my bed in the hotel room and opening a new book I'd brought with me for the trip: Dogsbody by Diana Wynne Jones. Within a few sentences, I'd forgotten all about the sandy ground outside, the beach tomorrow, the argument I'd had with my grandmother about my toothbrush (I'd forgotten it and she wasn't happy with me). I was Sirius, a godlike creature punished for someone else's crime by being banished into the body of a dog on Earth, nearly drowned at birth, and rescued by a girl in nearly as much trouble as I was.
It was my first introduction to Diana Wynne Jones's books. Since then I've read almost everything she's written. Dogsbody remains one of my favorites, together with A Tale of Time City, The Homeward Bounders, Deep Secret, Dark Lord of Dirkholm, and all the Chrestomanci books. I don't know any writer who could capture a child's way of thinking quite so perfectly. Her books are endlessly inventive and lively, funny and tragic.
Diana Wynne Jones died yesterday. It almost feels like something bright has vanished from the world.
March 24, 2011
He lives!
I had to drop something off at the cashier's office at work today, and who should I get in line behind? The guy-who-looks-just-like-Alex! I hadn't seen him in several semesters and had assumed he'd transferred to another college or graduated. I must have been right, because he was paying for a transcript. He smiled at me too. He smiles at everybody, because he's just that nice a guy.
That was a bright moment in an otherwise exhausting and dismal day. At least tomorrow I'm off work (I swapped with today, my usual day off) and I can sleep late and get caught up typing some of the thousands of handwritten words I've written on Bloodhound this week.
That was a bright moment in an otherwise exhausting and dismal day. At least tomorrow I'm off work (I swapped with today, my usual day off) and I can sleep late and get caught up typing some of the thousands of handwritten words I've written on Bloodhound this week.
March 23, 2011
Ditch Digging
No writing news, so here's some more talk about the great outdoors. Specifically, the ditch I dug.
We live on the side of a low hill that slopes down behind our house to a back yard that floods every time it rains. We've got a culvert in the side yard that theoretically carries rainwater from the other side of the street down our side yard to the back yard to the wet-weather creek that runs down into the woods. Until last week, the concrete culvert was silted up at the bottom and the ditch that leads from the bottom of the culvert to the bottom of the yard was nearly filled up with dirt, roots, weeds, and grass. Because the ground stays so boggy around the bottom of the culvert, Mom planted two big clumps of Tennessee water iris there and they've taken off.
Old picture of the water iris at the bottom of the culvert after a rainstorm (we have since moved the chairs, obviously):
Well, after all the rain we had a few weeks ago, the landlord wanted us to move the water iris because he thought it was diverting water toward the house. I decided to try digging out the filled-up ditch and removing a lot of the silt from the culvert, which was a job of work (although the flower gardens have benefited from the excellent rich dirt). Then Mom pointed out that the downspout just visible in the picture above, on the corner of the house, had no drainage and water just came down it and flowed along the side of the house. So I dug another, narrower ditch curving down from the downspout and connecting to the culvert.
And then I waited for it to rain. Which it did, finally, this evening.
So that was why I spent half an hour this evening standing with a flashlight in one hand and an umbrella in the other, watching water flowing down the ditch into the culvert, and watching water flowing freely down the newly dug-out culvert and into the back yard the way it's supposed to, without flooding. It was storming, did I mention? Fortunately I did not get struck by lightning.
While I was out there, Mom opened her bedroom window just above me, and said, "Are you still out there?" Then she said, "I think the iris are safe."
And I said, "If the landlord still wants us to move them, tell him I plan to put in tiny boat docks and bridges and railroad cars and possibly a complicated system of locks made out of Legos instead."
I hope it rains again this weekend.
We live on the side of a low hill that slopes down behind our house to a back yard that floods every time it rains. We've got a culvert in the side yard that theoretically carries rainwater from the other side of the street down our side yard to the back yard to the wet-weather creek that runs down into the woods. Until last week, the concrete culvert was silted up at the bottom and the ditch that leads from the bottom of the culvert to the bottom of the yard was nearly filled up with dirt, roots, weeds, and grass. Because the ground stays so boggy around the bottom of the culvert, Mom planted two big clumps of Tennessee water iris there and they've taken off.
Old picture of the water iris at the bottom of the culvert after a rainstorm (we have since moved the chairs, obviously):
Well, after all the rain we had a few weeks ago, the landlord wanted us to move the water iris because he thought it was diverting water toward the house. I decided to try digging out the filled-up ditch and removing a lot of the silt from the culvert, which was a job of work (although the flower gardens have benefited from the excellent rich dirt). Then Mom pointed out that the downspout just visible in the picture above, on the corner of the house, had no drainage and water just came down it and flowed along the side of the house. So I dug another, narrower ditch curving down from the downspout and connecting to the culvert.
And then I waited for it to rain. Which it did, finally, this evening.
So that was why I spent half an hour this evening standing with a flashlight in one hand and an umbrella in the other, watching water flowing down the ditch into the culvert, and watching water flowing freely down the newly dug-out culvert and into the back yard the way it's supposed to, without flooding. It was storming, did I mention? Fortunately I did not get struck by lightning.
While I was out there, Mom opened her bedroom window just above me, and said, "Are you still out there?" Then she said, "I think the iris are safe."
And I said, "If the landlord still wants us to move them, tell him I plan to put in tiny boat docks and bridges and railroad cars and possibly a complicated system of locks made out of Legos instead."
I hope it rains again this weekend.
March 20, 2011
Good fences
I've been threatening to post pictures of the garden, and finally I have. Here it is, in all its bare-dirt glory. (Actually, I have radishes and snow peas up already, but of course you can't see them.) Look at that beautiful fence! I did that! Mom helped, mostly by holding things for me, but I did it almost completely by myself.
This year we're going to eat well, oh yes. Look at that, there's even a gate.
March 19, 2011
Hell YEAH I'm American
I forgot about this picture. This was from last weekend, when Mom made hamburgers. I looked at my plate and said, "We are so American." That tickled Mom so much she took a picture of my lunch. And now it is forever immortalized on the internet.
Apparently, this blog post is brought to you by French's mustard.
March 18, 2011
Quick-draw mcShaw
You know those old cartoons where someone has to stay awake and they prop their eyelids open with toothpicks? That's me right now. (Well, not literally. I've always thought eyeballs and toothpicks should never be in close proximity.)
The time change caught up to me this morning. My alarm went off at its usual time, and as I always do I turned on my lamp and turned off the alarm. Then I thought, "I can lie here for a few minutes and still have plenty of time to get ready for work." FAMOUS LAST WORDS.
The next thing I knew, it was 7am. I usually leave for work at 7:10am. I rolled out of bed, threw some clothes on (and thank goodness I did laundry last night), buried my face in a bag of flour--er, put some powder on so I wouldn't scare small children, and ran out the door with a hairbrush in one hand and a cheese stick in the other.
I made it to work on time, too. But I can't say I paid all that much attention to what I was doing all day. And now, if I don't get to bed soon, I'll have to get out the toothpicks.
The time change caught up to me this morning. My alarm went off at its usual time, and as I always do I turned on my lamp and turned off the alarm. Then I thought, "I can lie here for a few minutes and still have plenty of time to get ready for work." FAMOUS LAST WORDS.
The next thing I knew, it was 7am. I usually leave for work at 7:10am. I rolled out of bed, threw some clothes on (and thank goodness I did laundry last night), buried my face in a bag of flour--er, put some powder on so I wouldn't scare small children, and ran out the door with a hairbrush in one hand and a cheese stick in the other.
I made it to work on time, too. But I can't say I paid all that much attention to what I was doing all day. And now, if I don't get to bed soon, I'll have to get out the toothpicks.
March 17, 2011
Waxing Gibbous is a good name for a band
You were born during a Waxing Gibbous moon
This phase occurs right before a full moon.
- what it says about you -
You like to question things and have issues settled before going to work on a problem. You appreciate art, elegant forms, and efficient designs. You seek deeper meanings in things that you see and want your actions to make the world a better place.
What phase was the moon at on your birthday? Find out at Spacefem.com
Incidentally, the picture above is inaccurate. It shows a waning gibbous moon. Maybe the picture's always the same, I don't know. I just didn't want anyone to be confused. Also, I'm showing off that I do actually know my moon facts.
