Reasons I haven't been posting lately:
1) Work. One of our cheeses won an award at the American Cheese Society, which is a big deal, and we've been doing a slow but steady upward climb in sales since. The sane response would be happiness, but this is my family, so we all panic instead. Panic!
Also, we now have about 4000 pounds of cheese pre-ordered for delivery in the last three months of the year. This means making 4000 pounds of cheese plus enough for our regular customers NOW. Panic!
And all this would be great except, due to the incompetence and untrustworthiness of building contractors and plumbers, we don't have the new cellar done, which means we don't have anywhere to put the 4000 pounds of cheese we are making because we signed contracts to provide it.
Panic! No, really this time.
The solution has been to hire a refrigerated truck for a month and stack our older, more stable, done-aging cheeses in it.* I spent much of the morning doing that. It is cold. And big. And has no lights, so it's really dark and scary when some right bastard closes the door on you because he thinks it's funny. (Dan? You are SO sleeping on the couch tonight, you twit.)
Also, we rented it from a guy who sells wreaths at Christmas and has no use for the truck the rest of the year, so it smells faintly of pine. This isn't unpleasant, just odd. I keep getting urges to sing Christmas carols while stacking cheese.
2) Toys. First it was writing interactive fiction games. Then, due largely to the insidious time-waster that is Nexus War, I got to playing with PHP and trying to code a game that way. I am such a geek. Dan's no help; when I appeal to him he looks at the code scrolling across my screen, shrugs, and says, "Love? You are such a geek." So it's unanimous, and I'm doomed. Geek!
3) Writing. As mentioned before, I started playing around with a story idea largely because I was curious about Forward Motion's Two-Year Novel Class (side note: the class itself is tres cool. You should check out the ebook version) and, to my utter surprise, the damned thing worked. The last eight months have been worldbuilding, characters, and outline, and as of this morning I have started actually writing it. It's utterly impractical -- my current working description is "neo-Victorian far-future biotech humor novel" -- but I am cautiously excited about it, if for no other reason than it's completely different from anything else I've tried to write. The goal is to finish sometime in March. We'll see how I do.
And this is a good thing, since I just got another rejection from the one agent who still had a partial of Harmony Station. Not that I'm going to stop sending Harmony out, but it's good for the ego to have a project you feel optimistic about sitting on the hard drive while the last project you felt optimistic about is getting the marketing shot out of it.
And that's... er, well, I'd say all the news that isn't, but really it's more like me running out of excuses. Maybe I should quit while I'm ahead.
* Refrigerated trucks are apparently, in the business, known as "reefers". It says a lot about the workplace that the management (aka my parents) finds this deeply amusing and have spent a lot of the last week dancing around shouting "Reefer! Reefer! Evergreen-flavored reefer!" Actually, that says just about everything about my workplace.
-------
Writing Progress:
Today's Progress: 586 words. Obviously. The daily goal is 500.
Comments: This is the first opening scene where I sat down and calmly worked out what would be the best "hook" for this story, what elements I wanted clear from the beginning, what I needed in there to intrigue readers, et cetera. I did not do this to be mercantile and calculating; I did it because I'm bad at beginnings at the best of times and this one was completely kicking my fuckin' ass.
The results are not bad. Maybe I'll try being calculating more often instead of as a last resort.
Snips: First lines:
There were many things, Elliot reflected, that could be done to make a favorable first impression on the people he had come to investigate. His assistant provoking the butler to violence in the first thirty seconds was not one of them.
1) Work. One of our cheeses won an award at the American Cheese Society, which is a big deal, and we've been doing a slow but steady upward climb in sales since. The sane response would be happiness, but this is my family, so we all panic instead. Panic!
Also, we now have about 4000 pounds of cheese pre-ordered for delivery in the last three months of the year. This means making 4000 pounds of cheese plus enough for our regular customers NOW. Panic!
And all this would be great except, due to the incompetence and untrustworthiness of building contractors and plumbers, we don't have the new cellar done, which means we don't have anywhere to put the 4000 pounds of cheese we are making because we signed contracts to provide it.
Panic! No, really this time.
The solution has been to hire a refrigerated truck for a month and stack our older, more stable, done-aging cheeses in it.* I spent much of the morning doing that. It is cold. And big. And has no lights, so it's really dark and scary when some right bastard closes the door on you because he thinks it's funny. (Dan? You are SO sleeping on the couch tonight, you twit.)
Also, we rented it from a guy who sells wreaths at Christmas and has no use for the truck the rest of the year, so it smells faintly of pine. This isn't unpleasant, just odd. I keep getting urges to sing Christmas carols while stacking cheese.
2) Toys. First it was writing interactive fiction games. Then, due largely to the insidious time-waster that is Nexus War, I got to playing with PHP and trying to code a game that way. I am such a geek. Dan's no help; when I appeal to him he looks at the code scrolling across my screen, shrugs, and says, "Love? You are such a geek." So it's unanimous, and I'm doomed. Geek!
3) Writing. As mentioned before, I started playing around with a story idea largely because I was curious about Forward Motion's Two-Year Novel Class (side note: the class itself is tres cool. You should check out the ebook version) and, to my utter surprise, the damned thing worked. The last eight months have been worldbuilding, characters, and outline, and as of this morning I have started actually writing it. It's utterly impractical -- my current working description is "neo-Victorian far-future biotech humor novel" -- but I am cautiously excited about it, if for no other reason than it's completely different from anything else I've tried to write. The goal is to finish sometime in March. We'll see how I do.
And this is a good thing, since I just got another rejection from the one agent who still had a partial of Harmony Station. Not that I'm going to stop sending Harmony out, but it's good for the ego to have a project you feel optimistic about sitting on the hard drive while the last project you felt optimistic about is getting the marketing shot out of it.
And that's... er, well, I'd say all the news that isn't, but really it's more like me running out of excuses. Maybe I should quit while I'm ahead.
* Refrigerated trucks are apparently, in the business, known as "reefers". It says a lot about the workplace that the management (aka my parents) finds this deeply amusing and have spent a lot of the last week dancing around shouting "Reefer! Reefer! Evergreen-flavored reefer!" Actually, that says just about everything about my workplace.
-------
Writing Progress:
Today's Progress: 586 words. Obviously. The daily goal is 500.
Comments: This is the first opening scene where I sat down and calmly worked out what would be the best "hook" for this story, what elements I wanted clear from the beginning, what I needed in there to intrigue readers, et cetera. I did not do this to be mercantile and calculating; I did it because I'm bad at beginnings at the best of times and this one was completely kicking my fuckin' ass.
The results are not bad. Maybe I'll try being calculating more often instead of as a last resort.
Snips: First lines:
There were many things, Elliot reflected, that could be done to make a favorable first impression on the people he had come to investigate. His assistant provoking the butler to violence in the first thirty seconds was not one of them.
posted at 07:56 PM on 08/21/06
by kat -
Category: General
Stumble It!
Comments
Margaret wrote:
Wow, congrats on the cheese, and supressing the panic gene. :P
08/22/06 08:53 PM
Margaret wrote:
Or, good luck rather.
08/22/06 08:53 PM