holiday winding down

I've been a little quieter here than I'd planned, partially due to a bad cold that snuck up right on time for the start of my vacation.  Boohoo.  It hit my husband, too.  But it was a good excuse for staying inside and watching movies and reading and sleeping in and all those other things that are a good part of a vacation, too.  

There was some frivolity.

Orange and white chevron and striped nails.

There was a very necessary haircut.


      

    







There were page proofs to review.

Commas to move and chocolates to eat..

But probably the most exciting things I've managed to do on this vacation is work on a new short story.    I'd love to finish it before the new year really takes hold.


You also may have heard that we got a record snowfall in Montreal.  

It helped encouraged the hibernation.

So I'm off to scribble down some resolutions.  How about you?

21 inches - when bigger is better

I’ve a handful of blog posts in draft form – things I want to write about and need to write about, but first I want to tell you about what right now feels like.

I finally finished going over my copyedits, sending them in late on Monday.  This involved staying at the day job until after midnight (ick) to make use of my much-larger screen.  My 11-inch Macbook air is the best computer I can imagine, but I knew the 21-inch screen at work would make reviewing tracked changes in the margins that much easier.  Using the latest version of Microsoft Word rather than Word for Mac 2004 sped things up considerably, too.  The document file for my novel is so large that switching back and forth between versions on my Mac kept forcing the whole thing to slowly repaginate, eliciting the dread spinning beach ball a little too often for comfort. 

Cubicle Christmas decorations – it's an office tradition I could do without, but I claim all the little stuff while everyone else gravitates to the larger angels and poinsettias. 

Editing at home is much more comfortable:

Pretty much my writing desk.

Last night I celebrated the end of editing by actually cooking a meal (I don’t want to tell you how long it has been), knitting (making progress now, but some previous mistakes and a possible lack of wool have made the project extremely dubious at this point…not sure what to do), and a little TV.

The novelty of blue potatoes:

Tri-colour potatoes awaiting their fate

Salad!  Arugula, chickpeas, feta.  Mmmm:

Red wine vinegar -- a great vinegar or the greatest vinegar?

I wanted to paint my nails, but I ran out of time.  But here's a picture of the colour I just stripped off.  I’ll post the name when I get home and check, but it’s from that same new L’Oreal colour riche line I mentioned before as being surprisingly heavy duty.  Sadly, this shade didn’t perform to the same level as the turquoise.  Maybe I just really didn’t use my hands for anything that other week..?  Still, it’s a nice blue.  Come to think of it, shades of blue have been my favourite colours for nail polish since high school. 

Deep blue l'Oreal nails.

Oh, and a drugstore display of Essie nail polish that got me pretty excited:

 I managed not to buy any but couldn't resist snapping a photo.

Ahhhh.  I have so much I want to write, and so many projects I want to get started on!  I need to get time back on my side...

country weekend

The weekend came and went.  I bought some books.  We drove to the country.  I read some books.  We had pizza and drank wine and played some games.  We went to the farmer’s market for coffee and pastries.  I read over part of a novel-in-progress I haven’t looked at in a while --- I’m thinking of going back to it.  I napped.  We went to my mother-in-law’s vernissage.  We worked on some wedding thank-yous.  We had a raw kale salad (really, unexpectedly good, with an anchovy/Dijon dressing), chicken and mashed potatoes, and maple ice cream for dessert. 

 

Nails this week: l’Oreal Colour Riche Nail Colour in ClubPrivé.  This is the second time I’ve used this polish with the same results: this is hands-down the best drugstore nail polish I have ever used.  If I didn’t already have shades similar to the rest of the line, I would pick it up in another colour.  It lasts a week with almost no chipping – results I can only compare to a salon manicure with all the chemicals.  Not to mention I’m obsessed with the colour (at knitting on Thursday it was noted that my nails even matched the snood I’m working on).  It’s even probably a little bit why I bought this book (although I’ve also heard a few raves):

Above: nails after a week of wear with no special effort to avoid chipping: not bad!  

Random: in my inbox this morning, an email from my friend M:

"On Saturday night I dreamt that we were travelling somewhere together and that the bus driver did not show up.  You drove the bus for a number of hours until we stopped to pick up a new bus driver.  You were AWESOME! I was most impressed."

I like this dream a lot.  Whenever I have a dream of myself driving, it's usually when I feel like I'm in control and getting somewhere I want to be.
 
Other photos from the weekend, already shared on Twitter:

Breakfast at la Chocolatiere in North Hatley.

 

Storm brewing over Lake Memphremagog. 

Editing is hard

A few things:

Editing is hard.  (In this case, I mean editing/cutting/rewriting one's own work in response to notes, both specific and general, from an editor.)  Not because editing is inherently difficult or because I dislike doing it or because don't think my work requires it.  No.  Actually, I think the challenges I am facing right now with Bone and Bread are trifoliate*:

• Once your words have taken a particular form that has been stable for, I don't know, years and years, and you've read them a hundred times, they just start to sound right that way...and it certainly doesn't mean that they're better that way or that they shouldn't be changed...it only makes it hard to imagine how. 

• Editing tends to involve moving around from problem to problem, which is a different kind of process from writing, where you are generally moving forward or through or at least thinking about a whole scene a little more slowly or singularly....and slow thinking tends to produce answers to problems.  It is harder to solve something immediately when you've only just arrived on the page ready to tackle it.

• Maybe it's due to this jumping from note to note and getting stumped on a problem and not knowing whether to linger until it's fixed or press forward unto the end, but this kind of editing makes it much harder for me to achieve momentum and focus.  

So that's why it's hard.  But it does feel better to complain!

As penance for whining, here is a picture of a dog dressed up as two dogs carrying a present:

So clever and cute!

The unpacking continues, even though it both should (it would be great to get everything in order!) and shouldn't (I should really be spending every minute editing).  Most of the boxes are gone, although disorder persists in  the closets.  I also found time the other night to paint my nails with a colour that is still one of my go-to shades after picking it up last year:  Chinchilly by Essie.  Essie describes it as a "sleek granite gray" (yes, they spell it that way), but I find it has some warm, light mauvey-brown tones in it, too. 

Chinchilly nails on one of our new cushions.

ALSO...and forgive the non sequitur...children really do give one hope for the world.  It turns out that this is one of those clichés that also happens to be profoundly true.  People in general give me hope, but I'm always caught off guard by courage and openness and grace when they are displayed by someone very young. 

*because it is my blog and because it is midnight and because most of my time is spent making judicious word choices, I am letting this word stand, since it has charmed me by appearing out of nowhere.  Trifoliate will have have its day in the sun!  Trust me, though, that my novel is not full of this kind of word, nor, I hope, many similar discursions...then my editing would be difficult indeed