Saturday, January 1, 2011

another new year

Which I can't say in sparkly shortbread, alas.

One of my Christmas presents from Mark was a membership in LibraryThing, which I fear will not enhance my writing productivity. Already I have discovered the joy of adding a book that no one else has, alternating with the joy of seeing who else has the same books. This with only 50 or 6o of my books added, and no adult fiction yet.

A shared Christmas present was a 2d-hand rowing machine, plonked now in front of the television. Mark is up to 40 minutes at a time, I'm at 20, and using it to catch up with the videos and dvds that I've bought over the last few years and haven't gotten around to watching. I'm favouring HK movies with subtitles, so I don't have to bump the volume up to hear them over the machine.

Much happy Christmas baking still remains, including rolled shortbread, pressed shortbread, iced cut-out cookies, chocolate shortbread, cheese shortbread, spicy cheese cookies, honey cookies, oatmeal shortbread, butter tarts, candied grapefruit peel, sugared walnuts, melting moments, bar shortbread, domino cookies, toffee candy (it was meant to be fudge), gingerbread snowflake cookies, one piece of birthday cake, gingerbread cake, butter pecan cookies and coconut macaroons. So if it were to snow for real and we were to be trapped at home, we wouldn't starve.

But now it is the New Year, and time to get seriously serious about finishing the revisions on Cost of Silver. This means writing more scenes relating to the draining of the fens, the English Civil War, and the witch hunts. There may have been cheerful things happening in the latter 1600s, but I'm not sure any of them will appear in the book. Angsty angstiness is the tone of the era, with occasional gallows humour.
Also: writing down actual comments for Anne's excellent slice-of-lowlife novel The Sleepy Teepee. And thoughts on possible markets.

2 comments:

Terri-Lynne said...

I want to be snowed in at your house.

Cost of Silver--this is the combined NaNo?? Or am I that woefully behind that I don't know of your newest writing project?

batgirl said...

Oh, how did I not see this and reply?
Cost of Silver is the story I began about the same time as Willow Knot, and almost used as my VPX sample instead.
It's been languishing since, stuck in a first draft with big holes marked 'stuff happens here' and 'check research'. Now it must be filled in and fixed up.