Three Cheerful Things

[dr_pretentious]

I knocked 1000 words out of Part 3 of the big book this morning. Tomorrow, I can reasonably expect to knock out another 2000. There's this 26-page dinner party that really, really does not need to be 26 pages long. I can't wait to get to Part 4 next week to fix the infamous 40-page parade, whose expository burdens I have since compressed into a single paragraph less than a page long, in which two centuries of frequent, bloody regicide are rendered in the seating chart for a very awkward party. It's such a relief to be making these repairs that I've known for two years now needed to be made.



sporos is in town, as is the Lioness, so the old grad school crowd is in high festivity mode. His comments on my revision progress:

Sporos:
Soon, you'll be rich and famous and I'll be able to hold your books in my hands and say to everyone, look at this cool person who is my friend. Are any of your friends this cool? Why, no!

Me:
Um, it's a good thing I don't need to be rich or famous, because I'm pretty sure holding my books in my hands is at the outer edge of what's possible.

Sporos:
Oh, I never said you needed you to be rich and famous. Your friends need you to be rich and famous. What about our needs?

Me:
Well, when you put it that way...



And now, because all the cool kids are doing it, the What's On Your Refrigerator meme:


the Why Cheap Art Manifesto, from Bread & Puppet Theater

The New Jersey Poetry Calendar

a picture of my mother kayaking on a tributary of the Patuxent River, taken by my father, the front of whose kayak intrudes into the foreground of the photo

a New Jersey Transit train schedule for the Northeast Corridor line

several of the magnets Dan designed for our wedding favors, emblazoned with our initials in zoomorphic letters out of the Book of Kells, with our anniversary conveniently along the bottom

The Poets House event calendar

a greeting card from sabrinamari with a photo of the famous Buddha statue in Kamakura, over whose head hovers a thought balloon that says "I hate my thighs"

two heavily annotated pages from the Worst Case Survival calendar that jaime_sama and garybart gave us for Christmas

a recipe for kale with porcini mushrooms and potatoes--very good

a photo of my cousin Ruth, now age 21, then age 10

a chart rating fish for dietary mercury exposure risk

fridge magnets with graven images of Hestia, Lilith, and the Green Man

menus for the local Thai, Pizza, and Chinese restaurants that reliably deliver

a photo of SSM, taken while she was living in Novgorod--she's astride the snow horse she made, in a snowy landscape, she's grinning, she's 20 years old, and I haven't called her in far, far too many years

a love poem John McDermott, one of my favorite local poets, wrote for his wife

an Audubon Society trading card of the Ashy Storm Petrel, because the big book needs shapeshifters

several sets of magnetic poetry words (basic, Shakespearean, Glasgow dialect), with several favorite arrangements preserved (like light boiling diamonds, the fluff smoothing apparatus, beseech thou my loathsome codpiece, damn seemly manner I belch, know her garden lest she ask you never, languid mischance always likes an idle dream hence slander not the maiden)

Comments

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

There will still be a parade, and it'll keep all the parts that advance plot and character, and just a few expository traces, but I wrote the parade because I hadn't figured out yet how the Beltresin succession worked or how six different Crown Houses had managed to have a chance at the throne in just 300 years. There's an awful lot of stuff in that scene that I needed to figure out, but that the reader doesn't have any use for.

Haldur will still [spoiler] the [spoiler], and the parade actually has more work to do now to show how relations between the commons and the Fleet have mended since the riot at the end of Part 2. I just remember the last time I read Part 4, pen in hand, waiting for pages at a stretch for something actually to happen.