the name's the thing

I love a book with a great title. Here are some that I love...

When Christ and His Saints Slept
The Way of All Flesh
Of Human Bondage
Things Fall Apart
The Poisonwood Bible
My Name is Red
A Fine Balance
Three Bags Full
Fall On Your Knees
Thus Was Adonis Murdered
Life, the Universe and Everything

Tennessee Williams was the master:

A Glass Menagerie
The Rose Tattoo
A Streetcar Named Desire
Summer and Smoke
Suddenly Last Summer
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
The Night of the Iguana
Small Craft Warnings

more worldcon

Stuffed Animal/Service Animal Badges
You may purchase a badge for your service animal, or
for an inanimate teddy bear, robot, or dragon. Just come to
Registration during open hours, fill out a registration form and
pay the $5 fee. We are happy to do this in almost all cases, but
reserve the right to decline a request, if for some reason we
deem it necessary.

Worldcon starts this Thursday... an exerpt from the handbook

Weapons policy for Anticipation will be as follows:
No weapon, whether edged or projectile firing (or fac-
similes thereof or anything resembling a weapon) shall be
carried within the boundaries of the convention. Any weapon
sold in the dealers room must be wrapped for transport to the
purchasers room.Penalty for failure to do so will result in the
dealer being asked to remove all weapons from their table.

There--I fixed it

Alright, je suis de retour. I finished the last scene of my subplot. The Word count is 75 979. With proper chapter spacing, the publishing word count (25 lines per page) comes to 97 000. That gives me the breathing room to cut as needed when I edit this mess.

I have no idea how this thing is going to read. The old text doesn't need editing--I edited it to death--but I have to reread it to make sure it's consistent with the new subplot, and to see how the subplot fits in, if it flows. This may turn out, upon reading, to be an "epic fail."

Is the stuff literature or not?

Archy and Mehitabel poems appeared in the 1920s, ostensibly written by a cockroach who would jump around on this writer's keyboard at night, and leave poems behind. He often had as companion Mehitable the cat, who was Cleopatra in a previous life.

My grandfather (the deceased English lit professor, who gave me my first book of Oscar Wilde plays) introduced me to these.

Here is a little tease of one of the poems...

boss i am disappointed in
some of your readers they
are always asking how does
archy work the shift so as to get a
new line or how does archy do
this or do that they
are always interested in technical
details when the main question is
whether the stuff is
literature or not

quickee update (excuse to procrastinate)

Banning from nets is going well--I've been pretty good about only going on for research. Yesterday was super productive day. Wrote all day, only taking Appropriate Breaks, and wrote all the new important scenes.

My word count (using old fashioned publisher word count method, which means 250 lines per page, about 10 words per line, and then you multiply your page count by 250) has gone from 70 750 before I added the new subplot, to 84 500. I have a couple more scenes to write, and then I've got to print the whole thing out and give it a good read over... find out if I've ruined the book. (The original sub-plot-less version still exists, in case this sucks.)

Today not so productive:
- woke up
- started laundry
- fed cats and ates
- read a little
- exhausted, fell back asleep
- woke up
- hubby insisted we do groceries
- went to library first
- ate at mall
- zellers
- pharmacy
- groceries
- came home and washed fruit
- continued laundry
- fell into exhausted sleep again
- weird dream
- awokes
- made a casserole
- got back to computer
- Gilby called
- got back to computer
- tried to think through what scenes I need to write next
- almost started internet surfings (this is what happens when I get story-stuck -- so dangerous!)
- am sleepy
- it's 3:30 AM which is when I should be going to bed
- so I am giving in to the sleepies
- start fresh again tomorrow

Must return to inter-bans now.

But first, a picture of Nombly eating green beans. ( "nom nom nom" as a lolcat would say)

nite cat iz on ur balkunee, wachin the nites go buy

If I'm home I often have the balcony door open for the cats. In a typical Montreal July/August it's too hot for that, you have to close the windows and just AC it; but it hasn't been necessary this year, so I keep the windows open as much as I can. Yay!

The cats don't go onto the balcony during the day, though, just at night. Especially Haylzebub. Man, that girl--she parks herself on the bench and stays out there for HOURS, only coming in when it's feeding time.

When I first met her at mum's house she used to try escaping out the balcony attached to mum's bedroom on the second floor, and we were always trying to prevent her so she wouldn't run off. But the couple times she escaped, she didn't leg it down The Secret Escape Hole like the other cats; she would just sit up on the roof and watch the night go by. That's all she was fighting and plotting for... the chance to sit out in the night.

Tonight (well, wrote this Wed night) I sat out on the balcony next to her and asked her what she's looking at.

"Mahmy," she said (that's how she pronounces my name), "that is on a Need to Know Basis."

And so I continue to be mystfied.