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I am sick.  The kind of sick where I’m technically capable of functioning, but I just want to lie down and never move again because I’m that tired. 

So I’ve embraced my un-functioning and ignored the list of Things To Do.  And I’ve done near nothing.  For over a week now.  (Today’s big accomplishment was making it to the pharmacy.  That’s the kind of week it’s been.)

But of course, people are noticing all those Things I’m not Doing.  And while I’ve miraculously managed to resign myself to not Doing Things, I still feel this crushing sense of irresponsibility whenever I know my not Doing Things is noticed by someone else, or might possibly be causing them some kind of minor inconvenience or disappointment.  My brain does not perceive these things to be minor.  Suddenly not only am I failing to Do Things, I am also Letting People Down.

This is crap.  I am not Letting People Down.  No one will die if I don’t Do these minor Things.  Maybe these people will decide I am unreliable.  Yet still, no one will die.  Life will move on.  I am allowed to be sick.  I am also allowed to be irresponsible.  Other people are allowed to think whatever they want of me.  None of it changes the fact that I am still sick, and the idea of forcing myself through the To Do list makes me want to cry from sheer exhaustion.

So shut up, brain.

• I finished the dang draft.  Then I made some quick revisions that I’m sure disturbed continuity left and right.  Then I sent the draft away (yay!) and have spent the meantime cataloging all the things that I know are still wrong with it and all the ways I should have made it better before I sent it away.  Oh well.  I know I can’t make it better right now.  I need some space.

• It’s been nine years since I lived in California.  There are only three things I miss about the locale: the ocean, the rainy winters, and sourdough bread.  In the Bay Area, grocery stores sell sourdough bread on the french bread racks.  It’s everywhere.  I used to live on the stuff.  And I didn’t realize it was a regional things until I moved away.  After nine years, I’m telling you it is impossible to find good sourdough bread in Utah.  This makes me very, very sad.  A friend gave me a starter for my wedding, and I’ve managed to keep it alive, but all my (many, many) attempts to make San Francisco style sourdough french bread have failed miserably.  I. could. not. get. the. stuff. to. rise.   No matter what I did.  And yes, the yeast was alive and no the water wasn’t hot enough to kill it and yes I kneaded it for long enough and yes I gave it sufficient rising time–sometimes 36 hours or more.  But!  This weekend!  I discovered a new sourdough recipe (different from the umpteen others I had tried) and got some (more) bread tips from a former-baker friend.  I modified the recipe to avoid previous pitfalls, and voila!  Out of my oven came real SF sourdough bread.  Not just good sourdough, but the best of all possible sourdoughs.  And it was easy!  And it came out the same way twice!  And it can be made all in one day!  I cannot contain my excitement.  There will very possibly be a recipe (with photos!) here very soon.

• This weekend Drew and I discovered X-box Live Indie Games.  Pure awesome.  Of course, we didn’t download any because of the cost involved, but I love that independent video game distribution is becoming possible for consoles.  We also discovered that Braid was available through X-box Live.  That one we did buy, and it is fantastic.  If SuperMario were a literary novel, this is the game that would be.  Five stars.  Everyone should play it.

• Leaves are turning colors in my backyard.  There’s snow on the mountains, which means the wind has suddenly turned very cold.  I may have to rake in the next week.  We turned on our furnace.  But my house is still full of sunlight, even when it rains.  South facing windows for the win.

• Lately I feel like I’m failing at everything.  This feeling! of failure! is so over the top that I know it can’t be a reflection of reality.  For example, when I finished my draft I was unsure that it was even readable enough to be called a narrative.  That is stupid.  I think the feelings come out of the tight-rope walk we’re engaged in.  As long as all plans go smoothly over the next six months, we’re going to be fine.  But lean a little to the left or a little to the right…and we’ll be falling.  And since when do things ever go smooth?  There are too many "ifs" in this plan.  It makes me twitchy.  I comfort myself in the knowledge that we have some very nice safety nets, so it’s not really that far to fall.  So I cheerfully do everything that lies in my power, because that’s all there is to do.

•   I’m drafting another book.  It’s nice to be writing something brand new again. 

Today I am despairing at ever finishing the draft I’m working on.  This is mostly because my protagonist has totally exhausted me.  She’s like that friend who you love dearly but who is going through horrible tragedy in her life, and calls you every day to tell you about it.  You love her.  You want to help her.  You are happy you get to be there to talk her through it.  But some days you’re so exhausted you want to hide in a hole and not answer the phone.

I’ve slogged through 5/6ths of a novel with this girl (again), and now I have to write her ending, her triumph (again).  And I wonder where I’m going to muster the energy to deal with it.

My next book is going to be a happier experience.  I write contemporary novels because they give me a break from the dark fantasy with deep psychological issues.  They come faster.  They feel lighter.  For me, anyway, fantasy is so much harder to write than contemporary fiction, because you have to deal with all the elements in a contemporary novel, plus worldbuilding and magic systems.  It’s just exhausting.

But before I can move on I have to dig out an ending to this one.  It’s probably not going to be all that great, but it has to exist before I can revise it.

Never thought I’d say this, but thank goodness for revision.  If I had to get it right the first time (or in this case, the fourth or fifth), I’d be in trouble.

There are five other books I’d rather be writing than the one I’m working on now.  But I still have to finish it, because finishing things is what I do.

This burnout, though, is a sign that I need to stop soon.  That’s the way drafting works–I can’t just work on the thing from idea to finished product straight.  I have to take breaks.  And it’s about time to break again.  Just need a complete draft, and then I can stop.

But then I have these five other projects I want to write.  I can’t write them all.  I have to pick one.

Maybe I just want to be first-drafting again.  This rewrite is like a first draft, except my brain expects it to be perfect.  It’s kind of exhausting.  I’d like to write a real first draft or two–the kind where I’m just following the outline and writing to the end fast so I can find the shape of the story. 

The last few years have been years of revision.  Maybe this winter will be the winter of drafting.  (And the inevitable revision that will interrupt the drafting, I. am. sure.)

But first I have to finish the current project.  I’m so wrapped up in it that I can’t even tell how close I am anymore.  Feels like it’s going to take years, but it could be a week.  *sigh* 

This post is going to sound like an advertisement, but I don’t care.

I like to cook, but I hate to shop.  I hate having to go to the store for one ingredient, and searching through a million recipes because I don’t have all the ingredients for any of them. 

The website supercook.com is my new favorite thing. It’s a search engine that searches recipe sites. You can put in the ingredients in your kitchen, and it’ll pull up recipes using only what you have, or listing the other ingredients you’d need to buy. I played with it a couple months ago, and thought it was pretty spiffy.

Then I tried logging in. Now the engine *remembers* everything that’s in my kitchen.  And it’ll save recipes for me that I think look awesome. Plus, it searches all the recipe websites I used to find through google–like Allrecipes and Recipezaar–so I’m getting the same recipes I used to get, without having to sort through the ones I can’t make.  

Even better: because it suggests recipes based on what I already have, it suggests things I’m likely to like, because I own the ingredients for the kinds of things I like to make.  Like lots of indian curries. YUM.

Today I wanted to make something with some red potatoes that were about to go bad.  So I logged in to supercook and emphasized red potatoes on the list of things in my kitchen.  The engine gave me a long, long list of red potato recipes, using only what I already have.  I chose one.  It took about 30 seconds.  Garlic red potatoes with lemon and parmesean are currently baking in my oven, and they smell divine.

Best website ever.  Seriously.

This week I have discovered that my draft is a draft and not a finished product. This seems to have been apparent to everyone else but me.

This novel is a beast.

ALL novels are beasts, but this one is a big hairy monstrosity of a beast.

I finally have the external conflict working. The internal conflict is not working. Yet.

I languish in the internal conflict. I’m starting to see shadows everywhere because of the utter bleakness of the inside of my character’s head.

But we’ll get through it, she and I. She may not think we will. But the difference between her and me is that I know how the story is going to end.

As I’ve been musing on fall yard tasks and spring yard plans, I’ve come upon a problem. Dear yard-smart friends, I have a question.

I have this space that some previous resident kindly blocked out for gardening. It’s big–like fifteen feet by five feet big, I’m guessing. The problem is it’s wedged between the house and the fence, like so:

I’m having difficulty figuring out what this space should be used for. All the food-product plants I’ve looked at require lots of full sun, and I’m thinking this space gets only 2-3 hours of full sun a day, tops. But it’s here, so I want to do something with it.

I’ve thought about using it for vegetables, but I have other planter boxes that get lots of full sun that I think I’ll use for those.

I’ve thought about filling it with strawberry plants, or half-strawberries half-blackberries and taking what I get. Those plants at least come back every year, so if I get some berries out of it it might be worth it. (More worth it than re-planting a failing vegetable garden every year, anyway.) Plus, blackberries are tall and will therefore get the sun clearing the fence for more of the day than something shorter. I stuck the few strawberries that were dying under my raspberries here for now, so I could leave them and fill in, or move them somewhere else.

I could just fill this with flowers. But it seems like such a waste when I have lots of little edges and corners to put flowers in. This space is clearly fit for something useful, if I can just figure out what.

If all else would fail, I could just stick some fruit trees here. They’d get plenty of sun since they’d be taller than the fence. But again, I’d rather plant something else in this space if I have a chance of being successful at it. I have other places I can put trees that aren’t so well-landscaped for gardening.

Opinions, anyone? Am I being too careful about the full-sun thing? I just don’t want to spend time and money on plants that anyone with garden sense could see weren’t going to produce where I planted them.

Edit: I’ve also thought about melons, but wash-rinse-repeat with the vegetable garden concerns.

The irises:

The tomatoes:

The sunflowers:

Tonight Drew and I finished making his new set of sculpting tools.  One of the many things we learned from Gencon is that one of the reasons he’s been having a hard time turning a corner on his sculpting is that he’s been using amateur tools.  Professional tools, as it turns out, cannot be bought.  They must be made.  With hammers and anvils and blowtorches.  I was less than thrilled to learn this.  We’re not exactly what you might call tool people.

And yet, we are now the proud owners of a hammer, anvil, blowtorch, safety goggles, and these little beauties:

I’m proud of us for these. We made them out of nothing but steel rods and brass tubes.  (And some super-glue.  That tool we were familiar with.)  Drew’s been using the tips sans handle for the last few weeks, and his sculpting has finally turned that corner we’ve been staring at for a year. Happy, happy day.

This photo actually represents two victories. The other thing we rehashed after Gencon was the photography. I knew the game companies got better photos of their minis than we did; I always figured they were using professional photo studio lighting, which = $$$. No. Turns out they’re using ten dollar shop lights, like these:

 

I just fixed a massive problem in my chapter-in-progress by having a character do exactly the opposite of what I had them doing before.  Also by remembering that a chapter should have four or five purposes if I want it to be compelling, not just one.  And also remembering that (as my husband pointed out) several of my characters have complex relationships with each other in addition to their complex relationships with the main character, and should act like it.

I like the changes.  I think they work.

Happy happy happy.