This is the end of the eighth day of writing, so I ought to have finished my sixteenth scene of the Pismo story by now. As it is, I’ve only finished fourteen scenes, so technically I’m two scenes in the hole. But it’s Friday, and the fourteenth scene was the conclusion of Act One, so I’m going to declare victory: One week complete! One act complete! On to Week Two and the first half of Act Two!
Monthly Archive for June, 2007
Page 2 of 2
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I ordinarily bake sourdough bread at least once a week, but the routine got interrupted several weeks ago and I’ve been feeling slightly subhuman ever since. I revived my starter over the weekend, weighed out and mixed the ingredients Monday afternoon, let the dough ferment until Tuesday noon, shaped, proofed and baked the loaf a few hours after that, and today I feel like myself again. It seems to be the case with me and cookingcraft that the rituals are more rewarding than the actual product– but the quality of the product is the measure of whether the rituals have been performed properly. But maybe everyone is like this?
I finished drafting my allotted second-and-a-halfth scene late this afternoon, and then set out to use our newly-built fire pit to make a wood-fired pollo alla diavola similar to the one described in Cucina & Famiglia, a charming and useful cookbook co-written by Stanley Tucci’s mom. The diavola is supposed to refer to pepper and not to chicken-charring flames from hell. I knew this, but had to re-learn it the hard way.
I went into today thinking that the scene-drafting was going to be hard and the troll-editing was going to be easy, but I was wrong. Evidently the step between first draft and next draft is a doozy. I will now go and open a bottle of beer (homebrew, but more on that later.)
David Rothman and Biiwide have joined forces to convince me that Google Documents is the best way to share work-in-progress. So: Here is the opening chunk of the Troll Story.
Please hew away at it: I need all the feedback I can get. And I can take it. I think.
In the middle of writing today’s second scene, I found myself staring out the window a little too long, so I went and put on my usual mismatched pair of beat-up running shoes and went out to till up a section of the back lawn for the girls to use as a garden plot. It’s at least several weeks too late to be starting a garden, but we’ve been suffering from horrible rototiller karma all spring (broken rototillers, immovably-huge rototillers, friends who almost lent us rototillers…) and the girls really want to put seeds (or leggy marigolds from the trays on display outside the supermarket) in the ground. So: Breaking up sod with a rototiller. When I got back from that, I found a comment on yesterday’s post from pilgrimtinker asking me to post the troll story. I’ll be happy to do that, although it will expose you to my pitifully-small word-counts, continuity problems and other early-draft ugliness. I went back and took a look at the current state of the first troll story scene, and it needs work before I’m willing to expose it, so that goes on the docket for tomorrow: Draft two and a half Pismo scenes, clean up troll scene, post troll scene.
On the plus side, I opened up yesterday’s Amazon package containing an inexpensive Bluetooth headset recommended by the Dragon people: blueparrot Bluetooth VXI Roadwarrior B150 Wireless Headset. “Proven by truck drivers in noisy environments. Blocks engine, wind & other background noises.” I have been trying to psych myself up to cutting out the longhand step and drafting directly by voice. But draftin’ while truckin’? That’s for me.
I started a batch of whole-wheat bread and set it out to rise on the fireplace hearth. (It makes sense to do that when there’s a fire burning, but no sense at all in the summertime. I seem to do it year-round though.) Then my parents showed up and my dad and I took off for the lumberyard while my mom took care of the girls. We bought a van-load of hardware, swing set parts and treated lumber, and Dad double-bungeed the van door shut over the twelve-foot stock sticking out of the back. We started out drilling and bolting in the carport until I pointed out that the growing assemblies would soon be too heavy to actually carry out to the yard, so we stuck an extension cord out a bedroom window and set up under the big oak tree. Every half hour or so I went in to check on the lifeless dough. The girls were watching Charlotte’s Web and jumping up whenever the weather radio went off, calling out approaching storms. In fact it did look like rain, so Dad and I worked as fast as we could, trying not to drop four-by-fours on each other’s heads. We got the frame for the swing set done and rolled upright just as the rain started to fall. Mom and Dad took off to get Dad to work a seven-to-midnight shift in the emergency room. I stuck the dough in the turned-off oven with the oven light on and took over with the girls, who were engaged in an all-out grunting duel on account of the pig movie.
After grunting and dinner and half a conversation with Rachel and the girls’ bedtime, the dough had finally risen and proofed and was ready for baking. I got two scenes drafted, but there appears to be some danger that each scene, though complete, will be shorter than the last. Things will get interesting once I get down to one-word-per-scene and under. The bread turned out okay. We had to use up stale tortillas and pitas all day today for lack of regular bread, but now I’ve replenished the supply. I feel good about that.
The good news: I wrote the first two scenes of the Pismo story today.
The bad news: I only wrote the first two scenes of the Pismo story today. There are fifty-six scenes in the outline and thirty days in June. That means I need to write an average of two scenes a day. Two scenes today: I haven’t banked any scenes for busier days to come.
The first scene was easy. I had already given it a lot of thought. The second was maddening. In my outline, I had written, “Exposition: describe the restaurant,” which wasn’t nearly enough meat for an entire scene. A sentence, maybe. I spent half an hour or so writing elaborate curses to myself until I invented enough business to build a scene around. I imagine that will happen a lot. Some of my outline notes are easy to write to; others not so much.
I also transcribed a few scenes from the longhand draft of the troll story using Dragon Naturally Speaking, which worked incredibly well. I used an earlier version of the software in the mid-1990’s to transcribe a book’s worth of interviews when tendinitis kept me from typing. Ten years seem to have brought lots of speed and accuracy improvements. Typing my longhand drafts is a chore. Dictating seems to take most of the sting out of it.
