A short week, we having celebrated “OK You Can Have A Long Weekend In August” Day on Monday. That last entry was actually run out at home, making it one of perhaps a half-dozen generated there. I expect I’ll be doing some work on the novel tomorrow, rather than my usual lunch out, to satisfy my own sense of devotion to the work. Here, have a look at how things stand:
I am, as it happens, right in the middle of the climax. This is fantastic, from a standpoint of the climax landing just about exactly where I’d hoped it would, but it is also amazingly frustrating because I have all the words surging about in my head right now, and if I could actually convince the whole world to ignore my existence for… I’ll say a solid five hour block of time, I could get it all out in a single session rather than stuttering along for a few pages before Mr. Slate yanks the pteranodon’s tail to announce the end of lunch. And I can’t just say to the family “I’m not actually here” in the evenings, because my wife has a role in a stage production of A Turn of the Screw and rehearsals are every damn night this week– the son wants a companion and the wife can’t drive. I got duties.
If you hear a slight humming noise, it may well be me in my excitement at being so close to finished the first draft. The climax is not quite underway, but the fuse on it is burning and about to enter the touch-hole.
That’s a rather better week of it. The summit is at last in view, too– I’m only about 90 pages from my goal. This is good news, because what little I know about pacing is shouting at me that delaying the climax much based on where the story stands now is not wise.
I also want to be slightly self-congratulatory about this weeks perseverance, as yesterday saw an honest parade of painful stupidity at Regular Job. I was able to grunt through it for the noon writing session, but at the cost of forgetting completely to reply to some emails from people seeking work on their pens. I’d best get at that, eh?
Yes, that is a crappy output. Not only did I not manage to get the binder open once during the vacation, I returned to find a more than usually tall pile of Regular Job awaiting my return (more than is usual for post-vacation, that is), and I forgot about a first-aid re-certification course that ate the whole of this week’s Wednesday.
On the up side, the course reminded me of all sorts of quotidian, mundane horrors to leaven my writing with. Brr.
19 manuscript pages, plus 7 pages of “Free Balloons for All Good Children”.
For those who take an interest in such things (I can’t be the only one), I yesterday depleted the last of the Diamine Prussian Blue which I started writing the novel with, so we can say with some authority that 4 ml of ink in a Sheaffer Valiant “fat” TD, with what I’d take to be a smaller medium point, will produce 226 pages of double-spaced writing on ruled 8½X11 loose-leaf paper. Given the vast amount of fiction I got out of the full 80 ml bottle, that seems about right, and that seems like pretty good value for money. Writing ink now shifts to the Diamine Oxford.
The miserable output on the novel this week is down to the demands of the Christmas season upon a fellows time, by the way. I suspect next week will be even sadder.
Oh, let me tell you about some fun I had on the weekend. Through my own negligence as a householder, I slipped on some ice. The main injury was not, as my initial vector would have had it, through taking the edge of a concrete stair to the parietal lobe, but resulted from my quick “thinking” to avoid such a blow; the non-slipping leg suddenly took the weight, slipped sideways on an entirely different but smaller patch of ice until it found traction… at which point everything below the knee stopped moving, while everything above the knee carried on for another three or four centimeters.
This hurt rather a lot.
The silver lining in this was twofold. I discovered that my son does not panic when a parent collapses in a howling heap, but waits for a break in the screaming to ask if he should go inside and call 911 (not this time). Also, I was presented with an unusual opportunity to amend the lyrics of a Sesame Street song to run “One of These Knees is Not Like The Other” for the amusement of my family.
The reason I mention all this is that my page output is a bit low this week. For some reason, I was having trouble focussing on Monday. Things are rather better now– I may even put aside the cane before the weekend is done!
24 manuscript pages, plus 11 pages of “Free Balloons for All Good Children”.†
† This is one of those stories that you either vent off by writing or go nuts from it presenting new and ever more upsetting details on the screen of imagination. I’m cracked enough already, so I’m dividing my attention until the short story is safely pinned onto paper; lunch for the novel, idle minutes in the last half-hour of the work-day and through the evenings for the this horror.
If nature can throw things like the flying squirrel, the sugar glider, and Draco volans in our faces, then it seems like we have to give the benefit of the doubt to two pen designers who come up with… remarkably… similar solutions to the same problem.
I have been wrestling lately with a Sheaffer Imperial I which needs new rubbery portions. Since the pen in question was sent to me mostly dismantled, I thought I’d take the opportunity to do an exploded view of the model, as I’ve done for others. When I slid the feed out of the shell, I said to myself, “That looks familiar….” In fact, the feed, and the way in which the point clings to it, are so like the same components of a Lamy 2000 that one might almost think they came from the same factory. Here, have a look:
Isn’t that interesting? Now, before we start pointing fingers and shouting “J’Accuse!” at anyone, remember how this entry started. What we have here is two companies facing a similar engineering challenge– how to get a small point to stay put in a semi-hooded section in which a traditional friction-fit arrangement of point and feed wasn’t possible? That both companies came up with a very similar response to the question looks a little funny, but consider how the increasing consideration of fuel economy through aerodynamics made so many cars of the 1990s and even the 2000s look like a well-used bar of soap. There might have been peeking at the work of the other. But it wasn’t necessarily so.
Oh, and before the Sheaffer partisans decide that it must be that Lamy was lifting ideas from the darling of Fort Madison, because after all, the Lamy 2000 appeared a full five years after the Imperial I, a word of caution. I can say with certainty that the insides of the 2000 are not much different from those of the Lamy 99…
The 99’s point-tabs look even more like those in the Imperial, don’t they?
…and the 99 was a budget version of the Lamy 27, and that pen was out in the world at least five years ahead of the Imperial. As were the ads bragging about its “Tintomatic” feed system. Just sayin’.
And on that note, here’s the week’s progress report:
I know that some people are even now sticking their heads into the blenders of Black Friday sales– my condolences to your loved ones, by the way– but since we are on the edge to the frantic buying season, I thought today’s Friday film might have a reminder of how to approach ads.
I promise I’ll lay off political stuff for a while after this. Heck, this is hardly political at all. It’s just a quick look at a major city with a space of nine years between the glimpses.
What's up at Ravens March. 