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Chapter Seven of Nameless has been posted! There is a birth, a death, two dinners, and a laying-on of hands.

FUN FACT FOR THE DAY: "drily" and "dryly" are both the correct spelling of a single word. I doublechecked this with the OED and it lists them together as dual acceptable spellings. I've never seen this before. What the everloving fuck, English.

But Shakespeare spells it Drily, apparently, so I have chosen that version.

Couple of new passages in the notes today, so if you want the full force you might skim through for them. :)

( Chapter Six Notes! )

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A package from Mum arrived today. It was less, uh, eclectic than usual: it contained a bag of Valentine's chocolate, a random string of mardi gras beads, and a "decorate it yourself" plastic Mardi Gras facemask. The entire contents were almost...relevant.

(As educated as I am about WHY we find masks scary, I still get a trifle creeped out when I open a box and there's a face wrapped in plastic staring up at me.)

All this is as nothing, however, to the photo she sent me in an email today. A photo of a hat. A cowboy hat. That she bought.

For her chihuahua.

The chihuahua that she doesn't have yet, in fact. They're picking him up in early March. The frontrunner right now, for a name, is "Holstein". If you are my parents, this is HILARIOUS.

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Man, putting this novel together is like putting a show up -- I spend all my time thinking about it, all my spare time working on it, and I become a very boring person because I'm elbows-deep in the lives of a bunch of people who don't actually exist. My days right now consist of sleeping, working, writing this, and occasionally taking breaks to read Travels With Charley, which is a really good read but I'm going to run out of bookdarts before I run out of book. How is John Steinbeck so awesome?

I don't even cook, I've been living on stuff in my freezer, take-away, and Snickers bars for a week. Not that I'm not loving every second of it, but I'm fully aware that this journal is excruciatingly boring right now to anyone not interested in my process.

When all this is over I think I'm going to write a piece on the process, because I don't know that any fiction author has ever put a book up in front of 2500 people and said "shred it" and then actually been able to rework it as feedback came in. That's not a complaint -- it's been deeply useful. It must be devastating to a writer to get useful critical reviews after their work has gone to print, because then they can't change it -- well, they can, but there are probably legal issues involved and thousands of copies already printed, and it's not like you can go up to your reading public and say "Oh sorry, that book you paid $25 for wasn't as cool as it could have been, here's the really cool version. That'll be $25."

On the other hand I am guessing professional published authors, you know, don't do shit like accidentally name a midwife BERTHA. Even when I don't intend to make puns, they slip out, it's some kind of disorder.

Anyway. I rewrote a bunch of Nameless tonight, clarifying stuff and adding description. There's still two messy bits to come, but they're a few days off from being posted yet so I'm hoping to brainstorm a workaround.

Blather blather blather. Thank god tomorrow's Friday. Tomorrow night I need to do laundry and pack myself some snacks and then Saturday morning I'm off for my holiday. With the tiny shiny!

Puppies, Oh My God

WHAT, puppies. WHY.

I swear to god, Jack, if you sicc'd the internet on me because of puppies I will find out, because I know everything, and then I'm going to let Gwen redecorate your office.

She's thinking batiks.

Batiks, Jack.