drafty in here, hur, hur.

Other than reading the last bit over in the morning, to be sure there isn't some error that makes a nonsense of it all, I'm done with the third draft of The Willow Knot.
104k wordage by Word's count.
Tomorrow I'll muck about with copying the file onto this-here computer and emailing it to round two of beta-readers. Plus printing out a double-spaced version for Paul, who prefers hard copy.

This coming week I will be living in the later 14th century, where laptops are unknown, and where Linot is only literate enough to keep her account-books in order.

And now I'm going to bed.

going under for the 3d time

Is that a recognisable reference any more? When I was a child it was supposed to be that drowning people went down 3 times, and the 3d time they didn't come up again. Cartoons had swimmers holding up one, two and three fingers as they succumbed, the last being the three fingers alone, slowly going under. I had a vague idea that rescue was only to be attempted on the 3d submersion.
But I ramble.
Done. Wrapped it up at 11:54 with 18,600 words by wordprocessor count, 98 pages in SMF. I'll post my progress wordcount later, after I've had some sleep. And dazed wondering where the story went, I'll post that too. It might be less dazed by then.

Next morning, FutureBarb entry:
Slept in until 6:30, probably because of putting up a new (darker) curtain in the bedroom. Breakfast, feeding of cat, watering of plants. Feet under the laptop by 7:45
break at 9:40 am for more tea - 12335 words
11:52 break for lunch - 13316
3:44 pm break for heated-up Chinese food - 14027
7:35 break for heated-up meat pie, cherry tomatoes from garden - 15120
Mark returns home somewhere in here, but tells me to keep typing and goes to have a shower
9:08 just checking - 16006
Oddly, this was my final wordcount at 11:45 pm last year. Two-and-a-half hours left to beat it!
11:06 just checking - 17668
11:54 call it quits and format to smf - 18570

Story stuff. The MPD aspect went west. Pearl is kinda crazy (think Emily Carr in later years) but not a multiple. She sees ghosts, goes to art school, falls in love/lust and out again, paints a series of ghost portraits that she becomes known for, falls into cranky dementia and does a landscape-with-crow-and-lost-child series as her last show while she's still holding it mostly together.
At story's end she wanders from the home looking for something, which turns out to be the lost girl, and the crow is looking for them both.
Is it good? Dunno. On the mechanical side, sentence construction, spelling etc. I'm usually okay, even when sleepy and stupid. Things happen in the story, and there are recurring themes and motifs, though some fall by the wayside and aren't really resolved. Pearl's first love affair is kind of scanted, but it may be better that way than fully explored and overbalancing the story.
The writing is less visual than in Fold, though Pearl's artist's eye gets some play, and there's some messing about with art jargon and thinking which medium would work better for which bit of scenery. The story is more rooted in the real world - Alberta farmland mostly - which means I did have to go and check a few things, like which art school she could have gone to, and the names of colours of pencil crayons. Which also slowed me down, of course.
I wasn't able to recover the straight-ahead don't-think altered state that I managed last year but this was a different challenge. The benefit this time is that I can probably edit and revise this one, where Fold has felt so all-of-a-piece I haven't really been able to crack it and tweak.

Today: printing it out and getting a statement (probably from Chris) that I wrote it all over the Labour Day weekend. And mailing.
Maybe next year I'll write an 18th c. epistolary novel with lots of abductions and duels and natural children and false confessions.