Word Count. Finally finished typing in the last pages of the book. Final count for first draft is 483 pages, with a true word-count of 93,641 words and an estimated word count (manuscript-formatted pages * 250) of 120,750 words. And so, so much work to do.

Read More »

Book Review. Watching My Language, by William Safire. William Safire writes a column for the New York Times on language. This is a collection of them. The main thing that I’m taking away from this book is the idea that grammar isn’t fixed, constant, or even consistent from expert to expert. Yes, it’s possible to

Read More »

Zen and Sex. You may want to skip this post. I’ve been reading a zen book to de-stress; more on that later. Some thoughts: The author talks about light and darkness. Light is a metaphor for the things we see with our intellect–the example he uses is a meal. We prepare separate dishes with separate

Read More »

The Court Jester. “Those who try to tangle with my derring-do, wind up at the angle that herring do. They hold their heads like very dead herring do.” I love that movie. PBS Saturday and Sunday afternoons, spent watching black and white movies. The Court Jester. Ivanhoe. And we knew when pledge week was on,

Read More »

O Mi-Mi Tee! We put up our little Christmas tree on Friday. I love Target. In a world of ritzy glass tree ornaments, they had shiny, tinted, plastic snowflakes and ball ornaments on sale, so we could decorate the tree together and leave it where Ray could touch it and not get yelled at (too

Read More »

Ugh. Don’t take a nap just before sunset, no matter how full and lazy you are. You’ll be so disoriented when you wake up. Bleah. And your mouth tastes funny. I know a good cure for nap-overs, though. Chocolate. You don’t know nap-overs? Rachael and I know nap-overs. There are times when we wake up

Read More »

Aha! Not a major epiphany. Not enlightenment. But a victory! Making dense cheesecase, you don’t really need a full crust to hold everything together–you just need some way of easing the thing out of the pan. So: Brush the pan with melted butter. Scatter graham cracker crumbs on the butter, about 3-4 Tbs. or so,

Read More »

Book Reviews. Summer of the Dragon, Elizabeth Peters, Monstrous Regiment, Terry Pratchett Elizabeth Peters is a mystery writer. She writes “perfect” novels–beginning, middle, end, all items neatly resolved at the end of the last page. The world extends just as far as the front and back covers. So, as far as it went, Summer of

Read More »

Scroll to Top