striving for patience

I took David B. out for lunch at Fune yesterday
in thanks for his help with the liner notes
of our new CD.


Trying very hard to be patient.

The more I work on my novel, the more frustrating it is not to be able to fully immerse myself without having to worry about taking frequent arm breaks. It has always taken me some ramp-up time whenever I do fiction-writing, to get into the flow of the story, into what's going on in the characters' heads at the point I last stopped writing.

I find, however, that I can only type for about 10-15 minutes before I need a break. I find it nearly impossible to use ViaVoice when writing fiction...by the time I've said "move down 2 lines, move left 2 words, select right five characters", the sudden burst of inspiration I had for a different turn of phrase for character dialogue or scene description is fading. Anyway, the need for frequent breaks is really slowing down my usual fiction writing and editing pace. Yesterday I only got through one chapter. But hey, I need to remind myself that that's better than the ZERO chapter progress of the past six months.

1500 e-mails in my Inbox, not counting filtered mail. Spam Assassin is starting to miss more and more spam messages. I -am- reading any e-mail from people whose return addresses I recognize, but will probably not be able to reply right away. Thanks for your patience.

The silver lining is that one of the things that I do during my breaks is study German. Yesterday I went downstairs and visited the Goethe Institute, about a minute walk away..or to be more accurate, about 30 seconds' walk away, at Emily & King. HOLY TOLEDO, what a treasure trove for me...a free library card gives me access to a wealth of German learning materials, videos, children's books, books and plays on tape, magazines, and books, all with a FOUR WEEK loan period.

The two librarians seemed amused (and somewhat pleased) that I was so excited about signing up for a library card. Hey, and the library also has chairs and tables... this could be a convenient alternative to working in my home office from time to time.



My borrowed selection from the Goethe Institute.
The big blue book cost $3 and was on the sale table, and seems
to be a collection of native short stories.


I've been reviewing my schedule and con budget recently, and here are a list of the conventions I plan to attend (or hope to attend) next year. Sadly, it doesn't look as if I'm going to be able to make OVFF this year. I need to focus on ramping up my freelance income between now and December.

GAFilk: Jan.9-11/2003, Atlanta, GA. I'll be visiting with Bill and Brenda Sutton afterwards, VERY excited about this :-).

FilKONtario: Mar.26-28/2004, Toronto, ON.

Confluence: July ???/2004, Pittsburgh, PA. Tentative.
(date given on site doesn't refer to a weekend, so I assume it's incorrect...if it overlaps Sara's birthday on the 27th, I'm not going)

Ohio Valley Filk Fest (OVFF): Oct.24-26/2004. Tentative.

Other news...

TypePad is MovableType's new hosted service. Costs $4.95/month. Good for those who want the flexbility of MovableType but don't want to worry about the coding/tech, and are willing to pay for it.

More people have responded to my "what if" poll from a couple days ago: Bill, Lynn, Lyanne, Paul (and his follow-up), HeatherB, AmandaS and Lainiekins.

Two years ago, Jeff and I were in Japan when the first plane hit the World Trade Centre. We were supposed to fly home shortly after the attack, but ended up being stranded several more days until we could get another flight home.

My heart goes out to those who lost friends or family on that day.

September/2003 comments: Read | Post | LJ