The progress is still painfully slow, but I am nearing the end… of the first draft. I’ve just realized I need to get some themes better inflated now that I’m approaching the endpoint, so the second draft isn’t going to be quick and easy, either. Probably. I’m bracing for it.
And while I complain about the speed of production, the fact that this first draft is going straight into a machine provides me with a small comfort– it’s now twenty pages long, which by my standards is a fairly lengthy number.
The Long Weekend was indeed very long for us. We got to watch a well-loved family member slowly expire. In the current climate of pandemic, our loss is bearable and small, but we feel it.
Hercule Grey, 2004 – 2020. The late Doctor Awkward Puss.
He was in his seventeenth year, so his passing was not entirely shocking. It was, in a way, a good death, because it was timely. We’ve lost too many to sudden tumors that manifested when they were relatively young. Old Doc just sort of stopped, like a clock that wound down, at an age where such a thing might be expected.
There was a small element of relief in it, too. For the past couple of years, he’d been a scrawny old man– my wife described him as “a furry bag of feathers”, and while he got plenty of rewarding cuddles from the newer members of the flock, he (and we adult humans) were perpetually concerned that the boisterous play of the young ones might do him an injury.
We have some pictures of him taken in what turned out to be the last two weeks of his life, which I will not be sharing. I have never forgiven the tabloid industry as a whole for the cadaverous LAST PICTURES OF DAVID NIVEN! which hung off the ends of grocery story tills, and I’m not going to share similarly gaunt images of one who should be remembered by the world at large in a different light. I will remember him in his appropriately sleek form, before his powers waned.
One of the last good pictures of Hercule, in which he is supported by Bram and Kees. Bram may be even more affected by his death than my wife.
A couple of post-scripts:
the name:
Hercule not after Poirot, but after Cyrano de Bergerac. As a kitten, he had a rather pronounced beak
Grey slightly after the fiendish probe-jabbers from Zeta Reticulum with their similarly-shaped eyes, but more so because my wife found his nature and presentation put her in mind of Joel Grey.
I am of course aware that this post (planned for this slot since Sunday) is going up on the same day as the announcement of the death of Diana Rigg. I could wish it were otherwise, but I’m sticking to the plan because I need to release the pressure. I will remember her mainly from her time in The Avengers, not because I insist a woman must be young and beautiful to be worth imagining, but because I watched The Avengers a whole lot during the first decade of my life. Emma Peel, competent and formidable, is firmly encoded in my core recollections.
I should probably also mention that there was no writing at all yesterday, as my wife was in the hospital to have a hernia de-herniated. She is fine, and as I like to point out when this sort of thing happens, the entire cost of the day was the gas burnt in a total of less than twenty minutes driving.
Well, OK, there was the pain-killer prescription, but between work insurance and the province’s Hey You Don’t Make So Much Let’s Help You Out drug benefit, a week’s worth of Tylenol 3 cost $7.96.
As one who is wrestling to absorb a foreign language, a frustration I sometimes feel is the lack of ways to express anger in other than my own language. Since I live in Canada, I have access to Tabernac! from the other side of the country, but I’ve never used it unironically (and I suspect it’s probably somewhat toothless in Quebec these days, too). The only good cuss I’ve got in Dutch is mierenneuker, but it’s not a general-use curse unless you deal with accountants a lot.
Having said that… let’s see how burly Norsemen would have shouted invective at each other while they were viking about.
I was once tempted to call someone a fokker, but realized that accusing him of breeding animals would mystify rather than offend.
Not huge accomplishment, but a flow. I’m starting to wonder if shaving my beard off (in the interests of better mask/head interface) has mystically affected my writing powers.
†It hadn’t occurred to me that I was putting these inks into the same rotation when I filled the Lamy. Having now written some things beside stuff from yesterday, I’m more convinced than ever that people who are lamenting Montblanc’s discontinuation of that ink should take comfort from the Diamine offering. At least in fine points, it’s difficult to tell the difference until your nose is on the paper.
I got as little done during the vacation as I’d hoped, and to be honest the past week hasn’t been as trying as one expects from the first after a vacation. Something I did manage to build during my time off was a low-key manifestation of writer’s block, which I managed to kick loose yesterday by means of a free writing prompt. I had meant to make it something short, but now that I’ve started, I’m going to let it expand; one does not look a muse in the mouth.
To make up for the long silence here, how about a long spoken-word presentation:
I will admit that I’ve actually spent some moments giggling and clapping at the scale of the latest story– not only being able to get to “show it to the readers” stage so quickly that I can actually remember what the weather was like when I began, but being able to hold the whole of the narrative in my head easily. All the more giddy to find I had sufficient think-tokens left in my reserves to work on a second story at the same time!
Something else I got around to setting myself up with this:
I’m not going to give it any more time on this branch of my online existence than this mention, but over at the writing preserve, it’s now an inescapable fixture in the sidebar. I do not expect it will make me a rich person.
…but I will hope, every so slightly.
The sharp-eyed will notice that I’ve done away with the “Duration” column of the chart. I know none of you care how long I’ve been at the task on a given day, and I’m finally convinced my own inward monitor that however long it is, it’s long enough.
What's up at Ravens March. 
