Sunday, 3 April 2011

Updates

Well, I had to use my driver's license from day one. The very next day Manda had trouble while we were out and I had to drive us to class (including teenager and toddler) and then drive her home and then drive myself back to work and then drive myself home in the rain up the 17. Fun times. But clearly God knew I'd need to have my license by that day, and so gave me an opportunity to get it the day before. Funny how life turns out that way sometimes.

I've been driving a fair bit since getting my license. It's still not fun, but I'm gaining a little confidence. Driving myself to class in heavy rain storm was the worst: the traffic was thick enough to have lots of chaos, and thin enough that it was still moving at a fair clip, add in torrential rain and a new driver....But I managed just fine in the end.

I continue to be plagued by a long stream of minor but obnoxious ailments. Most recently a stomach flu that dovetailed into the end of a headcold. I've only got a few lingering side effects from each left and am mercifully feeling almost healthy again, but there was a miserable couple weeks in there.

My computer is also ailing. It's getting old and slow, the poor thing. I wish I knew more about troubleshooting this generation of computer. It is being buggy: neither sleep nor hibernate works properly any more--the one just logs me out without actually turning off, the other tends to crash the computer entirely. So I have to do a full shut down every time. And start up takes about 15 minutes to complete now. I hope it can hold on a while longer though. Ron's laptop's hard drive just died entirely and we certainly don't need both computers down.

The results came back on the Stegner Fellowship--I didn't get in. Nevertheless, I'm glad I entered. I think it was a good step forward in becoming serious about my writing. I'm working on the 9th chapter now--by the way, if you're one of my readers and don't have 8 chapters by now, let me know and I'll send you the latest. Things are getting a little out of order as Gynna's most recently put out chapter is being delayed and we're filling in a bit more between Johan's illness and Gynna's departure.

Not that this is any real indication of what the novel length will end up being, but I estimate I'm a little more than 1/5 of the way toward a normal length fantasy novel with the new chapters included. Which feels about right in terms of where I'm at in introducing things and getting things rolling. Things always move faster at the end. I need to pick up the writing pace, though. I don't want to be writing this particular novel for years yet!

Let's see, what else is new. With Marc and Patricia as the upcoming King and Queen of the West, we'll be going to Pensic this year: my first. I've always felt that Pensic is a sort of Mecca for SCAers--you've got to go at least once in your life, so this is my chance. I've been weaving again--some simple inkle weaving to get me going and now I'm warping up a painfully period tablet weaving project in thin wool. I used the wool on the last inkle project and one of the warp threads snapped. In anything but wool that would have been pretty close to unredeemable, but I managed to patch the wool and weave past it. There's two inches that are a little funky, but it worked out fine in the end. Doing crazy tablet weaving things with it is a little intimidating, but I think I'm ready.

2 comments:

A Life Long Scholar said...

Yay weaving!

You have only sent me four chapters so far, do you want me to keep being one of your readers?

E said...

Yes!

I'll send you more soon then. People got out of sync and then I wasn't sure who had what...but yes!