Some Days in the Life - June 14, 1999
What storm? Let me tell you!
Tomorrow, Eileen hitches up and heads to Ireland until... well, July. Wedding, plus other stuff. She needs a vacation anyway. (Actually, so do I, but I'm not getting one any time soon. More and more my trip to Ithaca, which I desperately want to do, looks like it'll take place in August. After the Renn Festival, as I don't really feel "up" to it this year. Though I have a friend who's going to be in Ithaca in July, and it'd be fun to go hang out then and have fun with him. But I'm teaching Summer Session and I'm not positive the dates will completely match up. We'll see. I want to do that but we'll see. And this is a very long parenthetical section.) Akira, our primary summer worker for the first half of the summer, is down at orientation for College. Chris, our secondary summer worker until Akira leaves, when he becomes primary (and the Senior Intern next year) is recovering from surgery. Mason, the new Technology Clerk, is en route from Texas even as we speak, but won't be here until later this week and won't be working until next Monday, during which time Brewster Summer Institute will have started, and I'll be a part of it.
Plus of course we're still working on last-end network upgrade stuff and also working on resolving the Firewall issues and and and and....
Calm before the storm. I sip coffee, and consider.
I started my own Young Adult story last night. It's a fantasy, a la Taran Wanderer. I loved the Lloyd Alexander fantasies growing up, and this one's feeling like a lot of fun. It has a female lead, which I also think is important in its own way. There are just enough flighty females in Fantasy that I wanted to write one with a brain in her head. She's not the first, of course, but what the heck. Every little bit helps.
The story's flowing well, as is the Outline That Ate Hobokan. The outline's taking longer than I expect the entire supplement to take, writing. (In part because the outline's complete enough that I'll just be filling out each section if I get the book). So, it could be an excellent writing summer.
Why the children's book instead of From Nottingham to Runnymede? Because we've got a potential "in" at Random House, and because this is writing a lot faster. If I have an 70,000 word cap, I'm 5% finished after one day's writing. This is straight, almost episodic fiction -- far easier to build on than the serious, hardcore, "literary" novel I'm working on.
Besides, it's heaps of fun. And if I can maintain enthusiasm while waiting to hear on the Ethereal Player's Guide, I could have it potentially finished by mid-July. I've done it before.
As part of my drive, I'll try to keep daily word counts listed in here. You can all torture me if I skip days too often. I'll put today's at the bottom of the page. The working title is The Vessel of the Mountain Elves, but the 'working' working title is the name of the island country, Fairhaven. So that's what I'll refer to in here.
iMac color breakdowns in person, as we have a ton of them:
The richest looking color is "Grape." It's just dark enough so the translucence doesn't bug you. The most popular color is "Blueberry," but it's boring. "Tangerine" is a nice color for the nigh-transparent ones, but it's more orangy than it appears in pictures. "Strawberry" is distinctive, but I think it's kind of 'disjointed.' The red just doesn't seem to work for me. "Lime" is ugly, period. They should have gone with a forest green and called it Avocado.
And Alan, being from Australia, actually wants them to continue "Bondi Blue," which he prefers. He's the only one on the planet, however.
This should do it for today. The rough of Chapter One of Fairhaven's finished, at 3,670 words. (Or a total of, you guessed it, 3,670.) I don't promise a full chapter a day, naturally.
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