Fifty Thousand Words!
My earliest finish ever.
That is all.
I’m approaching the end of November. As people who know me will know, this means that it’s coming up to the end of National Novel Writing Month. As I write this, I’m approaching 50,000 words. I promised 60,000 words this year, so I’ve still got a way to go, but I should get the coveted green bar on the NaNoWriMo forums soon. What I need to stop doing is having days where I don’t write anything at all, but it’s a bit tricky when the other ingredients of the Time Of Panic are also looming. I’m therefore planning some sort of marathon novelling session at the weekend, and will probably write during the meet on Saturday as that usually works out fairly well. The plot’s a little stickier than it used to be. Lots of threads are starting to come together, and I’m rather worried that it’s all going to suddenly get very silly. One particular character’s introduction may have been a mistake at this point, and I’m seriously tempted to eliminate her from the story entirely during editing.
But I’m stuck with her for now, and she does have a habit of being rather wordy, so that’s something good at least.
Now for the other ingredients of the Time Of Panic: obviously I still have to work on PhD things. I won’t go into that, because people’s eyes tend to glaze over when I start talking about it — either that or I get into arguments about the necessity for correct-by-construction programming and dependent types. The other big panic-inducing thing is the concert on Tuesday, in which I’m playing bass recorder. Since I’ve not been playing it very long, this is a problem — not because of the fingering, as it’s the same as the treble/alto, just an octave lower. The problem is that the bass recorder parts are written in bass clef an octave lower than they sound, and I’ve never had to read bass clef before. This has made initial rehearsal of pieces quite tricky, because my bass clef sight reading is very, very slow.
But after Tuesday that will all be over, and I think we’re going to be okay. Whew.
So the next panic is the following week, as I’ve got my ABRSM Grade 5 Treble Recorder exam. The pieces might be okay — with the possible exception of the rather hideous List B piece (I do not like modern recorder music, or at least I don’t like what I’ve encountered of it so far — I’m quite sure that modern composers don’t set out with the idea of making a nice piece of music, but instead prefer to see how they can torture the musicians while pleasing the apparently deaf critics). The scales, though… that could be a different matter.
Add to that the difficulties of sight reading from treble clef onto a treble recorder when your primary sight reading practice has been from bass cleff onto a bass recorder, or from treble clef onto a tenor recorder (which is what I’ve mostly been doing in groups lately) and you have a recipe for more panic.
So got to squeeze some sight reading practice in somewhere after the concert, and not play any other kinds of recorder until the exam.
But on the bright side, my oven is now fixed, and a few other things here should get sorted tomorrow and maybe next week.