Oh She's Lucky She's So Cute...

Man, I know my kid is growing and learning new things each and every day, but sometimes being right there with her makes it hard to see. But we've hit some benchmarks recently that have really made me realize how quickly she is growing up.

First, I finally was able to turn her carseat around so that she is now front-facing. This is a wonderful thing for oh so many reasons. Then this past weekend I made the executive decision to take down the baby gates in the house. Up until now Baby Girl has pretty much been corralled up in our living room when we've been at home during the day. There are still a few areas that are no-go (such as the laundry room and our bedroom, where there are kitty boxes, and the bathroom and office, where there is stuff we'd prefer she not get into). She doesn't seem bothered that she can't go everywhere yet though. Indeed, if I leave a door open to one of the no-go areas (or even to her bedroom, where she is totally allowed), she will happily close it for me. Sometimes she closes the door with herself or both of us in the room. Sometimes, when I am in the office and leave the door open so I can keep an ear on her, she will come and shut the door with just me in the room and then wander off.

Yeah, she knows she is adorable.

So, she has pretty much taken to this new freedom like a duck to water. Basically, her new accessible areas are the front room (which serves as the dining room/sitting room/library area), the hallway, and the kitchen. And her room, but like I said, she usually just closes the door to that room and leaves it alone. Mostly I am okay with this choice. She truly does seem happier being able to explore and play in more of the house. Plus, I really like not needing to step over baby gates on a regular basis any more. My toes and knees are quite thankful for this development. My aging kitty is also appreciative (mostly--one of the kitty boxes is still blocked off by a gate).

However, my darling daughter has managed to find several new ways to drive me absolutely batty with her newly found freedom. Some examples include (but are certainly not limited to):

• Taking every book off of the shelf she can reach, one at a time,  and bringing it into the living room, usually piling it all in my lap.
• Taking her alphabet letters off of the fridge and rinsing or just piling them up in the kitties' water dish. (My husband has suggested this may be because she has some of those foam letters for the bathtub that have to be wet to stick to the wall and maybe she thinks these are the same thing. It makes sense, but this makes it no less frustrating to me or to the kitties.)
• Pulling everything out of the Tupperware cabinet and arranging it in various places in the house (her favorites are the kitchen floor and the living room floor). 
• Taking the basket of kitty toys and pulling out each toy, arranging them in the middle of the floor, and then carrying the basket around and seeing how it looks in different places.
• Opening the dishwasher when it needs to stay closed and alternatively, repeatedly shutting it (often without pushing the basket back in) while I am trying to unload it. Also, playing with the knobs and buttons on said dishwasher.

Isn't parenthood such a joy and wonder? Sigh. She also is quite fond of playing the piano in the kitchen nook, but this actually doesn't annoy me at all. She's better at it than I am, after all.

I like this toy a lot.

I am not really complaining, per se, but it is taking some adjusting to get used to her getting used to what she is now able to do. She realized she could reach my stuffed cardinals that live on the bookshelves, and I keep finding them in various places now. I am not worried for her getting into them, but I am slightly concerned a cat will find one and decide it looks like it could use some killing. Also, that bookshelf is never going to be in the proper order again (I guess it is a good thing that shelf mostly has my husband's books and not mine).

So, it is has kind of been a long and crazy week, and I have to say, I am utterly exhausted. If she is inclined to let me, I will definitely be trying to take it easy this weekend.

In other news, I have gotten my butt a little bit back in gear with working on my second draft, huzzah! I have typed up all of the notes and separated the general story and research notes from the notes that pertain to specific chapters. I have also put each chapter into its own file, to hopefully make it easier for me to get others to read and give feedback when I get going full-steam with the rewrite. I am also halfway through fixing all of the typos and errors I noted in my readthrough. I am sure it is not all of them by any stretch of the imagination, but it is a start.

I think we might head to the Botanic Gardens after lunch today. She can run around and explore and wear herself out well and good for naptime. 

Go swing by and check out this week's Gronk. Journey into the imaginations of monsters and kitties. It's super cute. Also, completely 100% accurate.

Take care and have a fantastic weekend!

Willpower, I Don't Have It

Well, I did it. I swore up and down I wouldn't, and then I went and did it anyway. For the first time since I stopped working at the cable company we once more have a subscription to premium movie channels, sigh.

So, I may or may not have mentioned before, but I love Torchwood. In fact, the only reason I started watching Doctor Who is that I had learned its spinoff would begin airing on BBC America and I thought seeing the parent show would help me to understand what the heck was going on. Everything about Torchwood just sounded awesome and intriguing to me, and my assumption that I would enjoy it was not wrong.

I mean, come on, they had a freaking pterodactyl in the lab for the whole first season! Also, Ianto, my favorite character (Jack is awesome, but Ianto was just so very...Ianto) had the same birthday as me (day and year) and I thought that to be very cool.

You can imagine my dismay when after the last season (a shortened mini-series), it seemed as if the cards had been dealt and there would be no more new seasons. Bummer, man. But then the news came down that BBC had partnered with the network Starz to fund more seasons and production of the series would move (at least partially) to America and it would indeed continue. Huzzah! Except...it would no longer be airing stateside on BBC America but instead on Starz network. Sigh.

I really thought I would be okay not subscribing to Starz. My original plan had been to just purchase a season pass to the show on iTunes and watch the new episodes with a day or two delay that way. Except. I really don't actually like watching television shows on my computer. I don't even watch that many videos--if it's a "funny video" that is getting passed around the web and it is more than a minute and a half long, I am more likely to just pass than to watch it. Web series, usually clocking in at a maximum of ten minutes long, are the far edge of my patience for such things. I know that TV on the computer is the way of the future and whatnot, but as I have said before, we have our humongous television for a reason: I like to watch things on the BIG screen. This fad of watching television shows on smaller and smaller devices (tablets and phones, for instance) just baffles me. Those screens are so tiny, why bother? But whatever. To each his own and whatnot. My personal preference is to watch it on my television rather than the computer. I know there are ways to watch it through the television from the computer but those are not any ways I want to mess with.

Also, it goes without saying that I will want to get the new season of Torchwood on DVD when it comes out. I really didn't want to shell out the money for the season pass and for the DVD set, that just seemed silly. Still, I would have to pay more than the cost of both on an annual basis to subscribe to the channel. For just one show that seemed even sillier. Then I learned that Netflix actually had a deal with Starz allowing subscribers to view the network's original programming via their streaming services a day or two after it airs.  Cool! Perfect solution! Through the magic of our gaming console, we do have Netflix on our television! But wait a minute, Starz, afraid of people not subscribing to their network if they can just watch the shows right away on Netflix, just renegotiated their agreement with the company. As of April first, there is a 90 day turnaround between the show airing and being available on Netflix. Still sooner than DVD, but...three months.

I was resigned to just hold off and wait until the 90 period had lapsed or the show came out on DVD, until all of the campaigning for the series on the internet started up. I just realized I am too excited about the new season. So I did a little searching around with my cable provider to see if there was any sort of good deal I could get, and I found one. For only a dollar more than just getting Starz, I upgraded to the next level of service up, and I get all of the Starz family of channels as well as the Showtime channels, a few other movie channels, and a few other general channels that I am actually interested in. Even better, currently existing customers upgrading to that tier get a three month discount that for me, since it was only a one level jump in service, comes out to getting the new channels for free for three months. Not too shabby I'd say. So I am all set for the new season of Torchwood, and my husband is just shaking his head at me in bemusement, glad I have something to keep me distracted from how many gigs he has coming up.

Still, I would hate to think I subscribed to all of those channels for just one show. That is still pretty silly. Lucky for me Starz just this past weekend started up a new series that I have also had my eye on (but was more willing to wait the 90 days for). I watched the first two episodes of Camelot yesterday and I have to say I am already pretty hooked. I have found the endless variations in Arthurian legend fascinating since my high school days (at least), and I am very curious to see where this goes. Though, wow, they aren't afraid to be showing off some flesh, are they? Oh well, I'm a big girl, I can handle it.

Since I got Showtime in the deal, I thought I might also give The Borgias a try. The first episode is in my DVR waiting to be fired up.

Boo for no willpower, but huzzah for new period dramas!

It's More Like The Dance Of Shame, Actually

So I know I've been a little bit quiet about my writing as of late. That is because, well, there really hasn't been a lot going on. I feel so horrible about how I have been slacking. But not so horrible that I've actually been motivated to do anything. Sigh.

Okay, that sounds bad. I may not have been doing any of the actual writing, revisions, or research, but I have been thinking about the story and the changes/tweaks I want to make to it. A LOT, actually. I just haven't done much more than scribble down notes.

Part of this is because I do need to get that research done that I mentioned earlier this year. I think the reason I have been dragging my feet is because the research is more for my own personal background information and not so much for the actual story itself. Very little of it would show up in the text. That doesn't mean it is not important, not at all, but it does mean I am less excited about it than I am about my ideas for the story.

Every time I think of a tweak I want to make or something I want to add, I realize it will require me to go and research something else (such as weather and climate patterns and their relation to types of flora) and I stall out. It doesn't help that at least one of those "tweaks" is going to require me to completely rewrite the entire last third of the novel, or at least do some serious gymnastics to avoid doing so.

Then, yesterday, I only made matters worse by realizing that the ending of this story (which I have been a little nonplussed about in regards to where we leave the central romance) is actually just fine if I do something specific in the next story. Well, that's all fine and dandy, but it doesn't help me one bit with writing draft two of Living Legend, now, does it? Grr. Argh.

So, here are the things I think I need to do in order to actually get in gear with writing my second draft:
-Go through my manuscript and type up all of the notes I have made so that I have them in one handy place.
-Do any research required by the notes.
-Make a new outline for the story so that I can figure out where expanded/new scenes need to go, as well as figure out if/how to rearrange the end.
-Fine-tune the world-building so that I know what these people are talking about when I start writing.
-Actually start the rewriting.

It's not that hard. The real challenge is to find/allocate a time during the day to actually go do this. I really can't work on this while my daughter is awake unless I have someone else watching her and I am not at home, and when I have my Baby Girl-free time, as much as I love her, I don't want to do anything that so closely resembles work.*

I know I know, waa, waa, my life is so hard.

Quit whining Cori and just suck it up already, geez.

Sigh.

So  yeah, that's the state of my writing at the moment. I am thinking, thinking, thinking about it (and about my upcoming November challenge as well as my sci-fi story). I just need to move beyond thinking. I will finish this draft this year, dagnabit, I will.

Perhaps today is a good day to type up those notes. Just gotta take the first step and see where I go from there, right?

*Note: I am not in any way trying to blame my lack of writing on my daughter. It is all on me. I am just trying to explain how I have been (mis)managing my time that is actually available for writing.

Time to Start Researching Australia

It is truly amazing how much work goes into writing a book beyond what a reader sees on the written page of the finished project. For example, I spent the month leading up to last November doing quite a bit of brainstorming, outlining, plotting, and world-building so that I would be at least marginally prepared to get the details of Etrasia right when I actually started writing Living Legend.

I did a little bit of research for my book before I started writing it, certainly. After letting the manuscript sit for two months and then reading through it again, however, I now know where I need to go back and dig deeper so I can provide a more authentic feel to my story. Most of this research probably won't even end up in the book itself (the expansions to the story as it is mostly will require fleshing out the world-building a bit more extensively, which is what the research will let me do).

For example, I realized upon reading through my story that the population numbers I have in my head for Etrasia just aren't realistic to the setting. Thus, I need to start doing some research on Australia. Why, you may ask. My story isn't set in Australia, it has nothing to do with the outback or aborigines. Well, that is certainly true enough. Etrasia, however, is in my mind approximately the same size as Australia, however, and though the environments of the two continents differ vastly, the population is actually spread out about the same. So that means I need to start figuring out what the actual population of Australia is (or what it was when the civilization there was slightly less technologically advanced). From there I can extrapolate the sustainable populations for small villages and larger cities. That, in turn, will let me get a better grip on the actual size of each nation's army, because I know I vastly underestimated that in my original notes.

I also need to research the actual dimensions of the continent so that I can figure out the mileages within my book. Going hand in hand with that, I need to figure out how far horses can reasonably travel in a day so that I can pin down more accurate travel times for my characters. My readthrough left me feeling like the travel timelines were a little vague and more than a little shaky, and I would like to firm those up in draft two.

Other research notes I made for myself while reading through my manuscript:
-Layouts of castles and medieval cities.
-Bone up on basic medieval architecture.

Then, of course, there is the ending. I still feel like I made it entirely too wishy-washy "oh there's hope for us all" and I feel like if I leave it like that, then when I continue this story in the next volume, I am gonna have to kill off one of my favorite characters. Look, I am not trying to purposely make it all gloom and glum or anything, I just feel like the situation these people wound up in at the end is one with some serious consequences, and they weren't even acknowledging this fact. While the romance is part of the story, it isn't meant to be the center, at least partly because, as much as I think these two characters really do love each other, I also firmly believe they just aren't meant to be. This is really intended to be one of those "it's better to have loved and lost" situations, but I didn't end the book with that implied, and I am not happy with that. So...that's gonna take some reworking, I think.

There are also one or two instances where the characters are acting kind of, well, out of character. I need to either fix that, or have a good reason I can show my potential readers for why that is.

All in all, I am really happy with how the first draft came out, especially considering it is a NaNoWriMo novel, which means it was written in thirty days. There is plenty of room for expansion, and I have some good ideas for where and how that expansion needs to occur. There are a few plot points, events, and characters that I feel came across a little vaguely, but I believe that is down to me not doing enough behind-the-scene world building, and once I have that in place, I can go in and tweak those spots to make them fit into the flow much better. It's pretty exciting, I have got to say.

One of my goals for the next month or so is to hit up the library to start some of this research I need to do and to sit down and do some more of the necessary world-building. I think Baby Girl and I are going to start getting pretty familiar with the local library. Assuming she can behave herself. Otherwise, I might need to find someone to bribe once a week to keep an eye on her while I go do research...

I am going to set myself a goal to try to have draft two finished by the end of August. I don't know how realistic that is, but that is my hope. That gives me September and October to think about this year's NaNoWriMo effort, as well as to start on the research for my next big project.

The more I start to flesh out the world I want to set my SF book in, I have to say, the less I think my original story idea fits the setting. So as I am fleshing out this world, I am going to also be looking for exactly what story it is offering to tell.

My brain is truly awhirl with the possibilities. I love it! Now, if I can just keep the momentum going, this could be a darn good year for writing.

Have a great weekend you guys! No post tomorrow as we have a rather insane travel schedule for getting to Seattle, and I have no idea when we will actually get to settle in to our hotel room, and therefore have internet access on my laptop. But I will be back Monday (hopefully) with all sorts of reports from the convention for you.