(no subject)

I have lost 10,000 words. I know, it's very negligent of me. I should be more careful.

What this means is that I only have 35,000 words to write between now and early February.

If you will cast your mind back, you will remember that my word-count was way more formidable three weeks ago. 45,000 words are out of the way. Of those only 10,000 have gone missing. The rest are done. Written. And I've been re-reading them and they actually do what they're supposed to do, too.

I celebrated by washing the dishes.

PS It's even hotter here than yesterday. In case you wanted a weather report. My hands are signalling the beginning of a change, though. In case you wanted a second weather report. And yes, I am high on wordcounts. Nice wordcounts. Happy wordcounts.

(no subject)

I'm taking a short break to ponder Elizabethan festive productions.

I'm not sure that 'festive productions' is the right word to describe the playtime in question (and it doesn't matter what they're called by moderns - I'm not writing an academic paper), but I'm very grateful to them right now.

In fact, at this moment, I'm very grateful for all those moments I've been distracted from my proper research by pamphlets and chapbooks and broadside ballads and other ephemera. I thought it was a terrible addiction that would lead to no good. Three times, however, this last fortnight, I've been about to dump the writing frenzy and go and do piles of research. Three times I've discovered that I have already done the research, over the last twenty years, just by reading and thinking while I read fun stuff (fun stuff printed four hundred or so years ago is no less fun for that).

I had to do a quick search ten minutes ago, just to double check my geographical terms (I needed West India, not the West Indies, for instance) and that the particular thing I was after wasn't a pehonomenon of twenty years earlier. Most of it though was there, in my brain, ready to be used. Add words and mix: instant writing.

There are occasional big dividends in being an historian and writing fantasy novels. It doesn't prevent the need for initial proper worldbuilding and solid thinking, but for the stuff that comes up at this stage in a novel, it can be awesome.

PS For those of inquiring turn, yes, this is the Canberra ghost story. It all fits. Really. Though Elizabeth did give me a rather surprised look when I described a scene I am going to be writing tonight (we had a Masques meeting and it was good, especially the moment when she was trying to think of something polite to say about my proposed scene).