Thank you, extended action sequence! That balances out last weeks miserable plodding nicely.
This week has been remarkably productive, indeed. Not only that great outpouring of novel, but I got a little story up on the other enterprise as well, AND… well, let me show you a very nice thing indeed from my profile on Submittable:
I have not been diligently submitting my stories, since most of my thoughts are filled with novel, but I have been poking away at it, and that poking had pulled out a plum! I won’t mention the name of the publication just yet, fearful of drawing the ire of Fate under the Counting Of Chickens Act of 1609; rest assured, there will be a big fat link to them as the date of presentation firms up. This is a pretty wonderful Christmas present for me, even if it did appear a couple of weeks ahead of the official day of HoHoHo.
Yeah, that word count is accurate. Technically. I did a stupid thing yesterday– I took another look at my first chapter. It seems that despite having been conscious at the time, or so I claim, I did not apply sufficient thought to the thing. It needed a good deal of work, because it spent a sad amount of energy introducing a character who does not appear in any subsequent chapter.
That is… not a good way to tell a story. I know this. I have known this for a while. Why I forgot entirely not only back in August but also the previous November (second draft, yes?) is a dark mystery. At least I noticed it before I handed it around to a lot of readers, so I haven’t damaged my reputation in the eyes of any but myself– and I’m well aware than I’m a vast collection of flaws lodged in a matrix of well-marbled meat.
The fix, which had created a vastly superior opening chapter, did so at the cost of about eight hundred words of length. Eight hundred gangrenous words that needed to go, certainly, but however medically necessary, an amputation always leaves a smaller patient. That and a relatively steep bit of revision on the part of the story I was already working on this week produces what looks like a very poor week for output indeed.
But I am working, damn it. To the spectral figure of Work Ethic who floats about my head, I say stop hounding me!
I am a couple of days late with a reference to Sinterklaasje, but if I’m in the “Happy Holidays!” camp, I can hardly strain at that sort of imprecise targeting. In point of fact, the only connection between the yearly visit of Sinterklaas and his uncomfortably caricatured sidekick and today’s stolen film is piles of Dutch kids (mostly happy), but that’s OK, too.
I visited this joint in 1976, and it was almost unchanged from what you’ve just seen. I was shocked to see a roller coaster rising above the trees when I drove near to it in 1998, but without a child in tow there was no reason to look in and see what other changes might have transpired. I may try to keep it that way, because there’s a certain purity of joy to the recollections of my long-ago visit.
I am once again remembering that, at one time, the central focus, the pivot, the omphalos of this blog was fountain pens and the praise thereof. This week’s film is the result.
If you’re even a little like me, you’re now all a-quiver to get your hands on a Pilot Parallel set. Remember, it’s not just the tools that count– innate powers and long-practiced skill also come into play.
This week brought another rejection which encourages– it’s amazing how some kind, non-pro forma words cushion such blows.
* I’m slowly working this into shape thanks to discovery a couple of months ago of Twine as a means of formatting that sort of a story (as with most discoveries, it was there long before I found it). It’s still a back-burner exercise, the thing I do on weekends (or Victoria Days, as in the instant case) when I have a little free time and I don’t have the current front-burner story at hand. I also don’t keep careful track of how much gets done at a sitting At the current pace, and with the estimated 60,000 words the whole thing runs to, I should be done it by 2019.
** 23 May was also my anniversary, so I was treating myself. I treated my wife to a pleasant sushi restaurant excursion, where we enjoyed raw fish like the freaks we are, and we were both given a subsidiary gift of our son’s willingness to cram salmon nigiri into his head without hesitation. He’s not not picky, but he’s kind of specific in his pickiness, and we’re quite proud to be the European-descended parents of a kid born only 500km from the geographical centre of North America who took willingly to various sorts of Asian cuisine (and peas!).
* Bad news, of the deeply inconvenient sort: a bank which lies between that of Regular Job and me, whose job it is to move my pay from one to the other, has had some sort of system error. Since “paycheque to paycheque” is the marching orders for my household, as it is for so many others, this is a nervous-making development on the leading edge of a long weekend.
Yesterday’s arm pain waxeth large. I’m going to go out and stick the offending limb in a snowbank. To the disappointed several who will look in here for amusement, this BBC article might fill the gap.
Part of my week off which didn’t involve household excavation was devoted to getting some more pages underway for my site. While I fell slightly short of having something I could throw up (so to speak), I did find some extremely unexpected stuff while ferreting after the history of Kaweco. That history is quite interestingly convoluted (multiple bankruptcies, name changes, and similar), and the current holder of the name is remarkably willing to admit to most of it. They also offer a vast trove of antique advertising materials to the seeker, and it is in that trove that I found befuddlement.
Shortly before the First World War, the company offered from adverts on a theme of Kaweco Appell! which we might bring into English as “Kaweco roll-call!” The first one I want to refer to is the less baffling one:
“You there on the right! You’ve ideas above your station!” And thus was created the sort of revolutionary that so troubled Germany in the period between the wars.
There’s nothing so disturbing about a pen-company roll-call which includes a bunch of office workers of diverse sizes and ages. The fountain pen is a natural tool to be found in a bureaucrat’s hand, and the only real head-scratcher to be offered by this delightful image is why Kaweco chose not to indicate how diverse their pens were. That poor little chap I’ve made fun of could have found something more suitable in the 1911 catalogue.
Now, for something that really knocks one’s notions of how to advertise pens askew, have a gander at this oddity, in which uniformity of pen length is just about the only thing that makes sense:
Welcome the the Campus Martius, lads. First lesson for the new century– close order penmanship! We don’t want any friendly-splatter incidents, so mind your spacing!
Um…. Er…. What? Is the God of War himself come to underline the idea that the pen is mightier than the sword? If so, then is the lesson meant to be taking place in the aftermath of the Siege of the Legations? Perhaps the notion is that all soldiers are united in their love of the more scholarly pursuits in the new and peaceful century… or at least soldiers of sufficiently modern world powers (hajimemashite, you there on the end, and good job jumping on the steam’n’iron bandwagon!). If so, the chap in the foreground might was to spend a little time with a mirror, moderating his blood-curdling snarl. A darker possibility is the underlying message that if you really want to kill lots of people, you have to get a grip on the written work of warfare. I really don’t have any insights to offer on the matter. I just thought I might draw others into my state of confusion, so as to not be so lonely.
What's up at Ravens March. 