/Pádraig rang this morning to let us know our friend /Frank Darcy died early today, which was not surprising news, but which was very sad to hear indeed. I’d spoken with his brother on Monday, after texting Frank, and had been told he’d slipped into a deep coma from which he was not expected to awaken, so … yeah. Not surprising, but very sad. We expect we’ll go into Dublin Friday morning for the funeral mass (I think probably it’s fairly traditional for the Irish to attend the removal, as well, but we wouldn’t be able to get back to Longford if we did), though the early trains might make it complicated. We’ll see.

In the schizophrenia promised in the subject line…aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, it’s really been a rather nice day. We have internets at home now, and I’ve spent the last couple hours trying frantically to catch up on some email and general arrangement of stuff. I’ve made a small dent, at least. We went to see “Hancock”, which turned out a whole lot darker than we expected, but in the end we liked it pretty well. I mean, c’mon, it’s Will Smith. What’s not to like? (really, if you don’t like Will Smith, you don’t have to answer that…)

I haven’t managed to reach 50K on the book yet. I’d decided I was taking today off, but then we heard about Frank, and I couldn’t afford to not write today if we’re going to Dublin on Friday, so I scraped through the last of chapter 14 and know where to start 15, but I didn’t quite make 50K on the book. OTOH, I have broken 250K for the year. Holy moly.

Wonder if I can show off the cover for issue #1 yet.

ytd wordcount: 250,600
miles to Isengard: 64.6

currently: depressed

Today has been pretty emotionally high-strung. I read this morning that our friend /Frank Darcy, the charming gentleman who ran the last two P-Cons, has gone into hospice and isn’t expected to live much longer at all, after spending most of the last fifteen months fighting stomach cancer. His daughter posted to his journal to let people know, and is passing messages along, which is incredibly thoughtful of her. Frank befriended Ted and myself early on in our introduction to Irish fandom, and I will absolutely never forget the entrance he made on Friday night at P-Con 5, clad in a tux and bearing a silver-headed cane. He looked smashing, and set off a fantastic weekend in absolute style. I don’t happen to believe in an afterlife, but if there is one, I rather think that would make a good entrance there, too.

The announcement made me very glad for my friends who have had cancer and who’ve come through it. Right now I’m full of hugs and tears, not just for them, but for everybody.

After that rocky start, I went over to the house with Mom and we unpacked the kitchen, or at least most of it. Poor Mom clobbered her head on the corner of a cupboard door. :/ And I went and collected /Emily from the train station, which pretty much signaled the end of the working day. We came back to Mom and Dad’s, fed the Emily, and eventually my sister showed up to do her photo shoot. We turned the living room into a makeshift studio, which was kind of fun, and spent a couple of hours in fairly high hilarity (Deirdre and I amuse each other immensely. We’re like Click and Clack, except we don’t have any topic of expertise to get ourselves a radio show about. We just make each other laugh a lot. :)), and I think we got some awesome pictures. ‘course, the cable for that camera is in Cork (or missing somewhere in the new house), so as soon as Ted gets here tomorrow I have to upload pictures and get the best ones in shape for the promotional thing Deirdre needs them for. The deadline, of course, is Thursday, so it must be done Post Haste. It occurs to me that this probably means I’m not going to get any writing done Thursday, either, which is a bother. Maybe I can get a few hundred words in in the afternoon.

The evening has been exceedingly pleasant and low-key with family (my aunt is visiting) and Emily, and…and y’know, wisdom dictates I just go to bed now. Tomorrow Emily gets to watch me unpack more of the house (she’s lucked out: she doesn’t get to help, because she hurt her back. Mom pointed out I’d used that excuse myself at least twice in the whole moving house scheme of things, and it’s true. Very effective way to not do much work. Not actually highly recommended, but effective.). She really knows how to have a good holiday. :)

ytd wordcount: 242,800
miles to Isengard: 36.2

currently: sad

Evidently Robert Aspirin has died, which is just too damned bad. I read his Myth books with great fondness as a teenager, and his Phule books with surprising fondness as an adult, and was happy to go back to the Myth books until one of the later co-authored ones pointed out, in the foreword, an idiosyncracy of Robert’s that had been retained despite the co-authoring, and having had it pointed out to me, I could literally no longer read his books because I found it so irritating. Regardless, I have nothing but fondness for everything I read prior to being made aware of that idiosyncracy, and I still remember finally cluing in (possibly via reading it somewhere else) that the Woof Writers were Wendy and Richard Pini. It still makes me giggle.

I never met him, and I would’ve liked to. There’s a part of me–a 12 year old part of me who didn’t actually get that anthologies are things created individually by many people over large distances–which still looks back on the Thieves’ World writers/world as … something quite magical, something that my teenage self, growing up in Alaska, envied and wanted to be a part of: writers who were working together to create new worlds and new stories and who, to my mind, belonged to a close-knit community. I didn’t like Thieves’ World at *all*, but I loved the idea of the community that had created it, and I would’ve very much liked to meet the man who brought *that* idea into my life.

(The idiosyncracy behind the cut, because somebody always asks, and because I don’t want to potentially make it impossible for other people to read his books.)

Read the rest of this entry…

currently: indescribable

I have finished everything except the epilogue and the rewrite of the prologue. The book is currently weighing in at 176,400 words, and I expect the epilogue will be around 3K, as will be the rewritten prologue (the original of which is included in the book’s wordcount, so it, at least, won’t add more to the book).

My plan: write the epilogue tomorrow morning, then do AAs on HoF all afternoon and into the evening, and then on Thursday rewrite the prologue and finish the AAs. Fixing manuscript notes, doing spell checks, and printing the TPC behemoth out while typing up the AAs will be Friday’s job, and both books will be turned in Friday afternoon.

I’m going to go have a breakdown now.

ytd wordcount: 197,100
miles to Minas Tirith: 397.6

currently: distressed

It appears yesterday’s utter exhaustion and inability to think stemmed from the onset of a head cold, rather than me having drained my brain so utterly as to be unable to function. That’s actually a relief: it usually takes me more than 2 intense writing days to wipe myself out, and I was seriously worried about that.

On the flip side, though, I’m still utterly wiped out (as it did yesterday, taking a shower exhausted me this morning) and in no condition to get work done today. I’m in the right condition to sleep, or sit somewhere with my jaw hanging slightly open as I stare blankly at nothing, and that’s about it.

So I think that’s basically what I’m going to do. Man, I’ve just got no reserves left. *drags self off*

currently: exhausted

We have returned the part of my life where there is no life, there is only Zuul, where “Zuul” means “wordcount”. I am attempting 5K a day for 7 days, because I won’t get any writing done at P-Con, and this book is a long way from finished. I have juuuuuust broken 90K on it. I am, at this point, certain I am halfway through. I might only be a few hundred words more than halfway through, but I am halfway through. I have somewhere between 50 and 80,000 words to go. I hope to God it’s on the 50K end, but I fear it’s probably more dead in the middle, around 65. 13 days of writing, if I can maintain 5K days. I don’t know if I can. *exhales noisily*

Anyway, the invasion’s going pretty well. Not quite as sexy as I hoped, but I can make it better in revisions. Right now I’ve just got to get through it.

Actually, right now I’ve just got to get away from a computer and take some aspirin.

ytd wordcount: 107,200
miles to Minas Tirith: 198.9

currently: blah

I’d make a cut, but I don’t know how with WordPress. :) Anyway, fingers are lots better this morning, the swelling is down a lot, the bruising has turned from black to somethng much purplier, which you can’t tell from this photo, which makes them look like zombie fingers, I think. :)

I am typing a bit faster today with my 8-finter (well, 7, really, since I never use my left thumb anyway) hunt and peck, but there is no way I am going to work at Nook. That keyboard, presented here, for those of you who haven’t seen it, is not at all friendly to inept typing. So I’ll go write Chance on the Dana today and if I’m terribly good I’ll finish the script. Not counting on that, but it’d be nice.

*trundles off*

currently: contemplative

Dublin and the NISFA meeting were grand. Seeing the family was grand.

Falling down the bus stairs when the driver accelerated and braked both very hard in very short succession and jamming the holy living shit out of my right pinky and ring finger was not so grand.

Both fingers are, on the palm side, purple and black from the top knuckle to the palm. This is with being coated in magic-bruise-reducing arnica since half an hour after it happened. :p They look like hell. They don’t hurt much,–they’re mostly numb little sausages, really–but the mobility is decreasing as the swelling increases. They’re clearly not broken in any kind of compound fracture way, but if the swelling isn’t significantly reduced by tomorrow I think I’d better find a doctor, which is something I have no idea how to do here. I mean, if they’re broken with a simple fracture, there’s not a damned thing a doctor can do besides tape them, which I’ve been doing anyway, but I don’t know, maybe I can sue the frigging Dublin bus company for time lost at work or something, because as you might imagine, I’m not typing very damned fast right now.

currently: numb