2009 Projects: One-month Update

[rsadelle]

I thought about doing an update, but then I thought it would be boring. dedalvs' update wasn't, though, so I've reconsidered. As you may remember, I have four 2009 projects going. Let's check in.

Dewey Decimal Project
Not only did I read my book for January, but I already checked out my February book from the library.

Food
I honestly see no reason to go back to eating dairy. I don't know that it's made any difference in my health, but it's easy not to eat it, so why go back? What surprised me most was that I don't crave or miss dairy at all. The things that shouldn't have surprised me but did were how much I crave salt now (Duh! Cheese is very salty.) and how much more food I have to eat than I think (a salad has way fewer calories by volume than a quesadilla). I've been eating a lot of salted cashews.

As for wheat, I don't know. I had some things that were wheat free but contained barley and rye (both of which contain gluten) and I think my joints were more crackly afterwards. I was going to try eating wheat this week and see how that went, but, uh, I don't really know what to eat. I do still have flour tortillas and pita in the freezer, so I guess I'll eat those with something this week.

Exercise
I did really well with this - my chore chart for the four weeks that ended Saturday has all its boxes checked off. I didn't cheat the weight lifting, either, which I have to admit to a tendency to do. (Cheating in this case means doing a few lunges or crunches instead of actually lifting weights on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.) I think the fact that there are shows I catch up on while lifting (varying things on Hulu on Mondays, Leverage on Wednesdays, Supernatural on Fridays) helps keep me on track. Dance is still a problem (last night, as I was falling asleep, I realized I hadn't done any dance and did a few wrist circles to make it for the day), but I did do pliés in the kitchen (using the counter in place of a barre) a couple of times.

Writing
My chore chart also has writing on it. When I added it to the chart, I decided that to be able to check it off, I had to write one sentence. This year, I decided I have to write 100 words to check it off. There were a couple of days in January that I remembered just as I was about to go to bed that I hadn't written 100 words, and sat down on the edge of my bed to write 100 words of the Chris/Steve story I'm working on (as seen in the screenshot posted here) in the notebook I keep there for times when I can't sleep until I write something down. (That story got a lot of work out of days I didn't write anything else.)

I solicited feedback from a couple of friends on the short story I want to submit to the anthology, and it looks like it doesn't need too much work before it's ready to go, and that a lot of the things that didn't work for my writing group do work for people who regularly read erotica.

On the erotica novel, I did fill in most of the brackets (places where I'd written things like [DESCRIPTION OF THE CAR] as placeholders) and worry a lot. I may try including the other character's perspective in the next draft, and schuyler has me thoroughly convinced it really does need a masturbation scene.

And then there's my paranormal mystery novel, which is where I really did some good work. My writing group critiqued the first 14 pages, which was helpful and encouraging. Every once in a while, I start thinking it's boring (it came out more of a procedural than suspense), but they all really liked it. I also got them to talk about the POV, and based on what they said, I think what I'm going for is working. However, the best thing I did with this novel in January was write about 11,600 words. I wrote just over 6000 of those last week. What I learned from my experience last week was that if I set myself a goal, I will meet it, even with a lot of goofing off involved. I set my goals by writing down my word count goal for the day (determined by checking the current word count and adding 1200) each morning. This week I'm upping the word count (7500 words for the week) and including the time I want to finish (3 on Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday; 5 on Tuesday because I'm going to help my mom with cleaning out her house; and 1:30 on Friday so I can go see Push at 1:50). What was most interesting to me about doing this was that I felt kind of at a loss as to what to do with myself over the weekend when I didn't have a goal. Saturday I kept myself busy with my ballet class, starting to read a book, and going to the movies and dinner with friends. Yesterday I wrote somewhere between 600 and 700 words of the Chris/Steve story.

Comments

[dedalvs.livejournal.com]

1. You and allegram and libraries! I declare...


2. You'll miss ice cream. You may not now, but you will when next I come up there and insist on sleeping at Shubert's instead of allegram's parents'. As for wheat recommendations, what about whole wheat English muffins?


3. I used to lift weights while watching football (I'd do five reps on each arm in between downs). That's before I realized how perfect pull-ups are...


4. I'm glad to hear someone else uses variables! I honestly don't know how authors got by before the computer. I use variables that are easily searchable (e.g., XXXXX, YYYYY, ZZZZZZ), and then I have a list of them at the front, so I can use a find and/or find and replace later. I also use color. For example, if there's a section I think is weak and needs more attention, I color it pinkish/purple. If there's a section that I want to refer to later, but it's going to be a lot later, I color it red. The second novel I wrote skipped randomly through different time periods in a guy's life, an the only way I could ever keep track of which was which, and whether I was balancing them appropriately, was by assigning each one a color. How did Faulkner (http://dedalvs.conlang.org/read/search_english.php?word=Faulkner,%20William) do what he did without a computer?!

[rsadelle]

Libraries rock! You can read books without having to actually pay for them.

I think I'll live! As for wheat, I don't really want to buy too much in the way of wheat products so that I'm not stuck with them if I decide to stop eating them again.

I'm using the exercises from one of the Strong Women Stay [adjective] books, so it's two sets of eight reps of each of six different exercises. I've been working on doing them slowly since my weights aren't that heavy (10 pounds - I worked my way up that far, but I don't really want heavier weights because if I wimp out and skip it for a while, 10 is about my limit when I start up again, and I'd rather have just one set).

I used to do a lot of variable-looking variables, but now I put some kind of descriptor in brackets to remind me what it was I needed to put in there. The brackets make it easily searchable. I write in Notepad or Dark Room (the PC analog of WriteRoom), both of which are text only, so I don't do anything with color. I'm also a generally linear storyteller, so the plot's pretty easy to track.

[dedalvs.livejournal.com]

Libraries: The original Napster.

If I knew I could never have ice cream again, I'd kill myself right now.

10 pounds is pretty good! I wonder why they chose eight reps...? Seems like such an odd number to pick (well, unless you count in base 8).

See, that's what the key is for (the thing at the top that says what each variable stands for). Brackets wouldn't be searchable—I mean, what of the ordinary use of brackets (that is, parenthetical comments within parenthetical comments [like this one])? WriteRoom looks pretty cool (just like Doogie Howser's journal!), but how could you write without italics? Even if you created a kluge like asterisks before and after, you can't find and replace style elements (well, unless you use LaTeX). I suppose I'm highly visual: I need things to look the way I want them to look, or I don't trust that they'll ever look the way I want them to look—even printers can betray you, as I found when trying to print out .pdf's on campus with various IPA fonts...

[rsadelle]

They even have CDs and DVDs! (I have two movies checked out at this very moment.)

I'm sure there's a reason for 8. I don't have the actual book to look it up, just photocopies of the pages that show/tell you what to do.

I have a lot of brackets for things that aren't repeated - "delicious things filled with [FILLING] and served with [WHAT?]" isn't something I need to say more than once - so a key would just be more work. I also don't have nested parentheses in anything other than LJ entries or emails, where I would just look things up right then rather than putting in placeholders.

You have to understand that I come from a fan fic background where, back in the day, everything was done only in plain text. I'm used to reading in plain text, and anything too fancy just irritates me. I do use asterisks for italics when writing (and sometimes have to seriously remind myself to change them to the code for italics for posting to LJ). I also come from the school of thought that writers should use italics sparingly: your words should be able to make themselves stand out.

[dedalvs.livejournal.com]

I also come from the school of thought that writers should use italics sparingly: your words should be able to make themselves stand out.

What an arbitrary assertion! I suppose the same goes for book titles, which don't need to be capitalized or underlined (the writer should be able to make it obvious that it's the title of a book!). Italics are nothing more than punctuation. Consider the following:

The cat is sitting on top of the mat. (As opposed to the table.)

The cat is sitting on top of the mat. (As opposed to the rat.)

The cat is sitting on top of the mat. (As opposed to standing.)

The cat is sitting on top of the mat. (As opposed to beside it.)

The cat is sitting on top of the mat. (Not any old mat, but the mat that were just talking about.)

Etc.

There is no way to encode intonation in writing; italics is the best we've got. And, unsurprisingly, intonation is kind of an important part of spoken language—something that writing attempts to approximate.

This, of course, is in dialogue; it rarely comes up in impersonal narration. Unless, of course, you're using a foreign word, in which case I'd prefer it to be in italics—especially if there's a similarly-spelled English word with which the reader should not confuse it.

[rsadelle]

Heh. I thought that would irritate you.