A Million Words

Maintenance had to come in and do some routine work on my apartment yesterday (replacing some of the outlets in the kitchen, or something like that), and rather than listen to them bang around, I decided to go out and do a little photography:



I like some of the pictures I got, but the session may have been a mistake -- I got perhaps six or seven decent pictures, but I got ELEVEN big red itchy bug bites. And I was only out for an hour! (Also, it was really hot and humid.)

I haven't put up a lot of pictures of food lately, but Saturday night I went to a lovely gathering with tacithydra, jess_ka, and ellevate. ellevate brought a fruit tart, and jess_ka brought star fruit, which means I got to eat this:



(It was delicious.)

Total words: 15,530
Total usable words: 10,433

Badges earned (since the last post):



Gold Star - For completing the April Challenge of 12k words in the month of April.



For completely scrapping at least 1,000 words and redoing them.



For mentioning a duck, goose or other waterfowl somewhere in your novel.



For completing a chapter that's a prime number (Ch. 3)



For writing 500 words and working out for 30 minutes every day for a week.



For writing 500 words and cleaning house for 30 minutes every day for a week.

My story, "Time to Say Goodnight" made it onto the Million Writers Award list of Notable Stories for 2007! The story appeared in Fantasy Magazine on the last day of 2007, and I'm thrilled that it made the list. A big thank you to Sean Wallace for nominating the story!

* * *

My story is in great company, other Notable Stories include:

"I'll Gnaw Your Bones, the Manticore Said" by Cat Rambo
"Sea Child" by Aliette de Bodard
"Tabloid Reporter to the Stars" by Eric James Stone
"The Surgeon’s Tale" by Jeff VanderMeer and Cat Rambo
"Metamorphoses In Amber" by Tony Pi

No progress report last week, because I spent a lot of time re-writing Chapter 1 and posting my wordcounter bar with a decreased word count would feel too much like going backwards. I think spending a lot of time on the first chapter was worth it though -- the early versions were so far off what I wanted that they likely would have thrown the whole trajectory of the story off. The version I ended up keeping (the 5th version) is far from perfect, but it's close enough that I feel I can move on. (Yay!)

This week has gone much better. Once Chapter 1 was in place, Chapter 2 followed along nicely.

Badges (from this week and last week):


For completely scrapping at least 1,000 words and redoing them. (Repeatedly)


For almost quitting for the day, but instead writing another 500 words.


For completing a chapter that's a prime number (Chapter 2)

tacithydra and I staged a gummy bear war. It was awesome. Go look at the pictures on flickr.

April 1st - April 5th

Wordcount: 3338

This week's word count is all on Chapter 1, which I am still tinkering with. The total wordcount is a bit deceptive, because I abandoned a couple partial drafts of Chapter 1, and haven't counted those towards the total. I'm still working out details about the characters/setting/plot as I go, so I'm okay with the low wordcount. Hopefully things will eventually click into place and I can pick up the pace.

Badges Earned:


For sitting down and cranking out 500 words when I didn't feel like it.


For writing 1000 words after consuming a cheeseburger-equivalent.

Last night for dinner I made meatloaf, and some potato-asparagus hash as a side dish. The best part? Leftovers make great sandwiches:

Someone told me that April 1st was a bad day to start a novel, so I started today instead. I wrote one word :) My goal is to write one chapter a week, for however many chapters it takes for the book to be finished.

I've located a progress bar:



Sadly, my one word is insufficient to show up on the progress meter.

Several other members of Codex are also writing novels at the moment, and as further motivation, I will be trying to earn badges, like the one shown below (unlike this sample, most of the badges are for completion of actual work) -- the full list of badges is up on my website.



As I earn badges, I'll post them here. If you're writing something, and would like to use the badges to decorate your blog, go right ahead.

This year, I decided it would be fun to dye some Easter eggs and photograph them. There are two main routes to go when doing Easter eggs -- hard boiled eggs and empty eggs. I decided to do empty eggs, since I'd never tried that before, and it sounded fun. Key word here is sounded. Blowing the insides of an egg out through a tiny hole is really only fun for the first couple minutes of the first egg. I wanted to do a bunch of eggs, and the task quickly became rather tedious (it might have gone faster if I'd been willing to make bigger holes). Anyway, next time around I'll probably go the hard boiled route, but now I'm familiar with the process for emptying out the eggs, should the need ever arise again.

Difficulties in getting the insides out of the eggs aside, I was had a lot of fun decorating them:



I bought one of those $2 egg dying kits that show up in the grocery store around this time of year (food coloring works just as well, if you happen to have that on hand). I then applied a variety of decorating techniques I'd seen described at various places on the internet. More egg pictures and a little description of what I did to make some of the eggs is up on my flickr page.

According to popular folklore, it is possible to balance a raw egg* on one end on the equinox. It was a trick my dad used to do sometimes when I was a kid. So if you have way too much time on your hands, you can spend today attempting to balance eggs on end :)



* Okay, I'll come clean. The egg in the picture is not raw, it's an "empty egg" where the contents have been blown out through a little hole in the bottom (I emptied several to make easter eggs, but that's another post for another day). The hole makes it rather easier to balance the egg upright.

Massively unhealthy side dish, or slightly unhealthy dessert?* Start with some healthy, nutritious sweet potatoes. Cook them. Mash them. Mix in: butter, milk, sugar, egg. Put mixture into a casserole dish. THEN, as if that is not enough, top the casserole with a mixture of pecans/flour/brown sugar/butter(yes, really, more butter).

And another picture, just to prove that there really are sweet potatoes under there:








* I ate this with dinner, so I'm going to go ahead and classify it as a healthy vegetable.

Last night, I made a batch of stew, based on this recipe. Except the grocery store didn't have rutabaga, so I substituted turnip. Also I forgot to get barley, so I substituted steel cut oats (and cut down on the flour, since the oats have plenty of starch to thicken the stew). Oh, and I tossed in a potato, since I had one. And some thyme. And I didn't have beef broth handy, so I used half chicken broth and half water with dissolved beef bullion cubes. But other than that I followed the recipe :)

Anyway, it came out great, and I had it with some nice toasted whole grain bread. And the best part? Leftover stew for lunches!

So if you've been reading the blog, you know that I've been doing cover art for AnthologyBuilder.

A while ago, I put together an anthology, and today it arrived in the mail. I'm quite excited about it -- fiction by Tina Connolly, Mary Robinette Kowal, Beth Wodzinski, Alethea Kontis, Melissa Mead, Cat Rambo, Nancy Fulda, Aliette de Bodard, Martha Wells, Jessica Reisman, and Samantha Henderson. And cover art by...me!

Today's date: March 14th
Today's high temperature: 91 degrees

My parents and my brother were in town visiting for my birthday yesterday, so we toured around downtown Austin and (surprise, surprise) I took a few pictures. I normally do nature photography rather than city photography, so this was a nice change of pace. A couple of my favorite shots:

Last night I went to see the Texas Rollergirls with tacithydra. We both took a bunch of pictures, tacithydra explained what was going on (I don't know much about roller derby), cute little kids ran around at halftime, and near the end of the match there was a big brawl involving both teams and some of the fans. So, all in all, a very entertaining evening.

Taking photographs at the derby was tricky because (1) the lighting was terrible, and (2) the skaters were mostly moving around pretty fast. I took 285 shots, and from those I picked the 11 best pictures and put them on flickr.

I think mangoes look kind of neat sliced up this way (and it really is the most convenient way to get diced mango for mango salsa) so I took some pictures.

Sent out my 100th submission this morning, to Strange Horizons. Since 100 is a nice round number, it seemed like a good time to put up some stats.
( See the Stats )

There are lots of turtles in the rivers/ponds/lakes around here, and I've been meaning to go and photograph them for a while now. This shot comes from a pond on the UT campus, where a bunch of turtles hang out on a regular basis. Much to my dismay, the pond was clogged with weeds, and not particularly photogenic. But I took some photos anyway, in hopes that through the magic of photoshop, I could come up with some serviceable pictures. I ended up really liking the effect I got by desaturating the background.

* Contrary to the title of this post, this is not a food photograph. No turtles were eaten before, during, or after the production of this photograph.