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Angela Korra'ti

Nanowrimo, Warder Soul

Nanowrimo Day 2 Report: 10,000 words!

I’m in the middle of working on Day 3’s words, so while I’m thinking of how to start off this next scene in Chapter 3, here’s a quick report on how yesterday’s writing went!

Notable things I had to look up: where the boundaries of Seattle’s actual city limits are, on the southern side of the city. Where interesting parks are, just south of the Seattle city limits, and how close they are to Elliott Bay. Doublechecking that Elliott Bay is in fact salt water. Pictures of Seahurst Park in Burien. And, what actual examples of woods that match the phrase “dark polished maple” would look like, so that I could visualize and describe a minor character properly.

This burst of effort let me finish off Chapter 2 and start putting a dent in Chapter 3, and write a fight scene! Fun! 😀

Now back into Chapter 3–look for the Day 3 report tomorrow!

Day 2 word count: 1,669
Nanowrimo total: 3,367
Full book total: 10,148

November 3, 2016 by
Nanowrimo, Warder Soul

Nanowrimo Day 1 Report: Well, that started well!

My Nanowrimo 2016 effort is officially underway–and I gotta say, people, having Scrivener this year, and specifically having used it to plot out the entire outline for Warder Soul, has made it significantly easier to get the words out of my brain and into the draft. All I have to do is more or less follow the outline, with occasional pauses to look things up if I need to, and make comments there and there to note stuff I’ll want to fix when I come back through on edits.

Also, since it’s been a while since I did an official Nano, I checked in on the official site and woke up my account there. Wow, that site’s a lot more organized and detailed these days! So I filled out a lot of things in my profile, including details on past Nanowrimo efforts: the 2003 win, but also the failed attempts in 2005 and 2009 that did at least add words to Lament of the Dove (which of course eventually became Valor of the Healer) and Bone Walker.

You can see my official Nanowrimo profile here. And hey, if you’re participating in the madness, feel free to add me to your buddy list!

As to the actual words, I am now very, very close to finishing Chapter 2. Finally.

Things I looked up as part of last night’s writing effort:

  • Pics of Ravenna Park in downtown Seattle, with an eye to trying to identify how many picnic shelters it has available, and how close such shelters are to nearby streets
  • Model names for electric cars, because here’s a fun trivia fact: Elessir drives one

And here’s a snippet of last night’s words, which I shared to Facebook and Twitter!

There are reasons I don’t own a car, mostly amounting to how I hate driving with the blazing passion of a hundred fiery suns. Especially during rush hour. Especially during the winter. You’d think that with all the rain we get in this town, people would be better at driving on wet roads, but you’d be wrong. We’ve had a massive uptick in population in the last few years, not only computer geeks from all over the world to feed the ever-growing staff needs for our local tech companies, but refugees from Syria and other troubled parts of the world as well. And every winter, all these new drivers get to learn the joys of what our rainy season does to oil-slicked asphalt—not to mention how fast one or two accidents anywhere on our highways can slow down the whole system.

I would rather face demons than drive during a Seattle rush hour. And I’ve faced a demon.

And I realize that it’s traditional to start a Nanowrimo effort with a fresh project, but I am taking the liberty of doing Warder Soul anyway even though I had nearly 7,000 words in it already. I’m pretty sure nobody’s going to actually mind, as long as I do actually throw 50,000 brand new words at the book to count whether or not I win this year. So here are yesterday’s stats!

Starting word count for the book: 6,781
Day 1 word count: 1,698
Nanowrimo total: 1,698
Full book total: 8,479

November 2, 2016 by
Nanowrimo, Warder Soul

Nanowrimo 2016: FORTH EORLINGAS

Tonight, after I dine upon a dinner of tofu, I’m going to dive headlong into something I haven’t tried for a few years: an official stab at Nanowrimo.

Up on the block: Warder Soul, Book 3 of the Free Court series. Which, yeah, I’ve actually already started, but I haven’t put nearly as many words into this thing as I should have by now and I’m hoping Nanowrimo will help me out with that. I’m out of the habit of daily writing and I need to fix that pronto. Doing Nano in 2003 when I originally wrote Faerie Blood was very helpful for that. So I’m hopeful that doing it again this year will do it again.

Plus, Faerie Blood was a Nano novel. It would satisfy me deeply to have another book in the series come out of a Nano win too.

So yeah, I’m doing this thing. I’ve woken up my profile on the Nanowrimo site–as always, I’m annathepiper there if anybody else doing Nano wants to buddy up with me.

This time, I’ll also have the advantage that Warder Soul is pretty much already outlined in Scrivener. If I keep to the outline, if all works well, I should be able to chug through this at a much brisker pace than I’m used to.

There will be word count updates here and on my social media accounts, so follow along and cheer me on as I get back into the groove of making life very, very difficult for Team Kendis.

FORTH EORLINGAS!

FORTH EORLINGAS!

Who else is doing Nano this year? Join me in the madness!

November 1, 2016 by
Music, Quebecois Music

Fiddle geekery, October 2016 edition

This past weekend I had my latest lesson on the fiddle with Lisa Ornstein! We’ve more or less settled into a “once a month” kind of schedule, which is working out pretty well. And it’s a nice long lesson, too. Which is good, because if I’m going to drive all the way down to Olympia, a couple of hours of learning time makes that drive very, very worth it.

Lisa has told me some very gratifying things about how, since I have a bit of an analytical mind, this is standing me in good stead when it comes to understanding the various aspects of playing the instrument. And I certainly have to admit that coming at this as an adult student with a prior musical background is speeding things up a bit–Lisa only has to teach me the physical aspects of playing the instrument. She doesn’t have to teach me how scales work. We just have to focus on how to hold the instrument, how to hold the bow, and how to make noises that don’t suck.

I haven’t been practicing as often as I should, probably. (This is what happens when I have a full time day job AND I have writing to do!) But I do try to pick up the fiddle at least every few days and work my way through scales, and review how to hold the bow properly. We’ve wound up reviewing my bow grip at the beginning of the last couple of lessons, and this past weekend in particular Lisa had me move where I’m putting my thumb. I’ve had a bit of trouble getting it to settle properly on that notch between the grip and the frog–my thumb has a way of bending too much and coming in at a bad angle there. So Lisa had me move the thumb out to rest against the metal sleeve that holds the very bottom end of the bow hairs. She said this was often what Suzuki beginner students are taught, and during the lesson it certainly seemed to me like that gave me a more stable grip on the bow. Moving forward, I’ll be holding my bow like that and we’ll see where that takes me.

(More fiddle geekery behind the fold!)

Continue Reading

November 1, 2016 by
Main

Songda turned out to be a bust, and I feel fine

So it turned out that the predicted storm on Saturday was way, way less intense than the forecasters were saying. Enough that KOMO’s weather guy and Cliff Mass both posted embarrassed commentary along the lines of “yep, we pooched this one big time, sorry about that!”

From news articles I saw go up on Sunday, a lot of people took to Twitter to complain about this, particularly in re: how they got emergency supplies for nothing. To some degree I sympathize with that. It is annoying to be told by local officials “OH SHIT BIG STORM COMING IN EVERYBODY GET READY”, only to have that not actually happen.

But on the other hand, I also feel that this is actually the far preferable scenario. If the forecasters are going to fuck up a forecast, I would much rather have it be “far better than expected” rather than the other way around. Mr. Mass and his compatriots are getting shit for screwing this up, sure, but they’d be getting a lot more shit if they’d been all “okay, garden-variety storm coming in” and it turns out to be “OH SHIT WORST STORM IN 54 YEARS”.

And honestly, it ain’t like we aren’t going to have more storms. Those emergency supplies everybody went out and got? We’ll be using them sooner or later. Probably sooner, for those of us in Kenmore. The 2016 storm season has only just started and I am positive Kenmore will lose power at least once more before the end of the year. My house did in fact go out for about 11 hours, from Friday afternoon to just before 1am Saturday morning, even if we held steady on Saturday night. Other locations in Kenmore did go out during Saturday’s bluster, too, as I saw on the PSE Outage Map.

Mr. Mass’s last post did include some chagrined acknowledgement that while he did try to communicate that there was uncertainty in how the storm would play out, and that any little deviation in its track could dramatically change the impact on Seattle, he clearly didn’t communicate that well enough. So here’s hoping that he and his local weather colleagues can come up with a good game plan to make that happen next time we have a potential severe weather situation.

Because it never hurts to be aware of the worst case scenario, even if that worst case scenario never materializes. Better data about how probable that scenario will be, though, will help us all make the proper judgment calls on how we plan our responses.

So hang in there, Puget Sound area weather people! Many sympathies for the difficulties of your job! And hopefully this is the worst that the 2016 storm season will throw us.

October 17, 2016 by
Books, Other People's Books

An undaunted by Typhoon Songda book roundup post

The last gasp of Typhoon Songda is on the way into the Puget Sound region as I type this, and chances are high we’ll lose power! But before that happens, hey, let’s get this post out of my Drafts queue, shall we?

Had a little bit of credit on the iTunes/iBooks store, so I grabbed a few Tor titles from that store–since Tor publishes DRM-free and DRM-free is the ONLY way I will buy from the iBooks store:

  • Song in the Silence, The Lesser Kindred, and Redeeming the Lost, all by Elizabeth Kerner. This is a complete trilogy, The Tale of Lanen Kaelar. I read Book 1 ages ago in print, and kept meaning to get caught up on it. It’s a fantasy story with a side helping of romance, which as y’all know is Relevant to My Interests. And this one had a decent take on a dragon hero that could ever so helpfully shapeshift to human form, as I recall. It’s been long enough ago since I read Book 1 that rereading it will be basically a clean slate.
  • Karen Memory, by Elizabeth Bear. Historical fantasy. Grabbed this because it’s set in the early days of Seattle, in our days of “seamstresses”! (And if you have ever taken the Underground Tour in downtown Seattle, you know why that’s a significant word in our history!)
  • Updraft, by Fran Wilde. Fantasy, YA. Have had my eye on this one since it came out last year, and since Book 2 just dropped, the price on this ebook finally dropped to 9.99. Wanted this because I thought the description of the society where it’s set sounded interesting, oriented around flight and altitude.
  • Last Song Before Night, by Ilana C. Meyer. Fantasy. Got this one because of the protagonist being a musician, and music appears to play very heavily into the plot. And I’m definitely partial to music-related SF/F, as y’all know!

And while I was at it, I also happened to pick up a couple of books in print from Third Place:

  • Voyage of the Basilisk, by Marie Brennan. Book 3 of the Lady Trents because yep, keeping up with the whole “I want this in print as well as digital” thing for this series.
  • This Gulf of Time and Stars, by Julie Czerneda. Paperback of Book 1 of her current Clan series, because yep, Czerneda I buy in print and digital as well!

58 for the year.

October 15, 2016 by
Main

Opening act is done, headliner is on the way

Those of you who follow me on social media, or who saw the posts that went up on angelahighland.wordpress.com, LJ, and Dreamwidth last night, know we lost power around 2:30 yesterday afternoon. We were down all evening, but at least as of right now, we’re back.

How Are You?

How Are You?

Yesterday evening, we amused ourselves with playing around with instruments and with listening to one of the Big Finish audio adventures off my phone, piped through a Bluetooth speaker. The Cloisters of Terror turned out to be a delightful thing to listen to during a power outage! In no small part because Mr. Baker was in fine form in that story.

Here are the sorts of conversations we have in our house when the power is out!

Dara (while trying to figure out the chord progression for a song): OMG this chart doesn’t HAVE an A flat! They just skipped it!

Me (nodding sagely): ‘What damn fool would want to play an A flat chord on a bouzouki?’

And also:

Me: Okay good chiro has power. So I will go out tomorrow and bring back any necessary things. Be thinking about necessary things I can bring back.

Dara: Electricity! 4 buckets of electricity!

Paul: I think the fridge is going to need more than 4 buckets.

Dara: Okay, 6 buckets! Go to Costco.

George, bless his little kitty heart, kept wandering around mewing in a sort of “EVERYTHING IS DARK AND WEIRD AND QUIET WHY IS IT LIKE THIS AND WHY ARE YOU ALL IN THIS OTHER ROOM OH HEY THE FIRE IS ON YAY WARM”. And once we settled in to listen to the audio, George curled up in front of the fireplace to go zzzzzzzz.

I went to bed around 10:30ish and woke up just before 1am when the noise of the neighbors’ generators shut up. I sleepily realized the clock was blinking, checked the time on the phone (which I was keeping by our bed), and noted 12:54. So our power must have come back just a few minutes before that, long enough for neighbors to go YAY and turn their generators off.

Dara brought the servers back up this morning, and I scampered out to go to chiro and Safeway and the booze store (so that I could replenish the cake vodka and Baileys supply, and OH BY THE WAY YOU GUYS, I did find another bottle of Pumpkin Spice Baileys, which is an actual thing that exists and you should try it if those are words that sound like fun to you). Dara is heading out now that I’m home again, as the Norwescon concom has a meeting today, and they kinda can’t cancel it, because it’s at the hotel and they’re contractually obligated to use the rooms when they’re booked for. But she’s going to scamper back here ASAP when the meeting is done.

As of this writing Seattle City Light has a mere 11 customers out. Puget Sound Energy has 5,125 down still. And I gotta say, cranky as I am that PSE has been so random in our power service this year, their crews were out last night working their asses off. And that we got power back in the dead of night means their crews were out there in the wet dark, working for us. So kudos to them for that.

The current High Wind Warning is supposed to kick in at 3pm this afternoon and run until 2am, with the peak winds now expected between 5pm and 10pm. Cliff Mass has his current forecast up here, and from what he’s saying, the storm is still aiming for north of us, but we’ll be on the very edge of it. Seattle proper may dodge a bullet, but chances are high that Kenmore will get hit harder. And even if damaging winds don’t smack us, chances are VERY high we will lose power again, possibly for days. Expect that angelahighland.com will go down again, in which case I will continue to post updates on angelahighland.wordpress.com as well.

And given that the wind conditions yesterday still caused quite a lot of damage (note the gallery of pics on the Seattle Times’ updates here, PARTICULARLY the snapped power pole), I’m still expecting things to be very, very messy tonight and into tomorrow.

Brace for impact, Cascadians. Charge all your devices. Do your laundry while you still have power. Songda is COMING.

October 15, 2016 by