I WIIIIIIN!

NaNo's site reads my novel as only being 50,196 words - but I knew that would happen, so I wrote until I had 50,318 on OpenOffice, just to be sure.

But I WIIIIIIN! After cranking out, what, four thousand freaking words today?? Insanity. But I did it! And I think I actually covered all the ground I'd had planned out (aaand then some), so I'm really, really happy.

I feel like it might actually be somewhat readable in its current form, too, which is new. There are some bad rambling places, but overall... I am pretty darn happy. There are scene changes! There are people with personality! There is some less-than-painful dialog! wooo!

...and the book I mention in that last paragraph? Is the one with the flower-meaning lists that I've been consulting all along. :)



Yaaaaaaaaaay. That makes three wins out of six attempts - wooo for a 50% success rate! \0/

oh quantum physics

Tom gave me a pretty good explanation, and I read the following articles and looked at their pictures, to try to get my own grip on the physics of the teleportation we've been doing lately:
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/19690
http://www.aip.org/png/html/teleport.htm
(The second one is a rather old, outdated article, but the basic premise is the same - and it's explained muuuch more simply.)

It took me awhile to realize that we're not actually moving particles around, just the information that makes the particle what it is. Or something like that.

The best way to learn something really is to try and explain it to someone else... even if that someone is a fictional character. That you yourself are writing. (Bonus points if she knows even less science than you do!)

But I am GOING to make it to 50k! I had a coworker's party Saturday night, and then went downtown for a little while, and I need to remember I can't drink as much as other people I know. ;p Crashed that night. Sunday I worked early, as did Tom, so after getting home and then going grocery shopping... uh, we were out by like 8pm lmfao. So I wrote about a thousand words before showering this morning, spent the day on a belated Thanksgiving dinner for us, aaaand now am trying to write before the three glasses of wine make me fall asleep. woooooo!

wallpaper and old toys

This is the kind of wallpaper in the little bedroom, though there are touches of the colors of some of the others in this set. (And that site is absolutely amazing, I looked at eeeeverything they offer before leaving the website last night. The papers are all so, so pretty! and such a fantastic reference for historical interior design. <3)

It took me awhile to get the kind of information I wanted about kids' toys around the 1880s, 1890s. Teddy bears were 1902, but a German company, Steiff, started selling these little felt elephants as pincushions right about 1880 - only kids played with the things more than mothers used them as pincushions, so the company decided to go for making stuffed animals instead.

I had a hunch wind-up toys were around that era... and, holy crap. The little wind-up tin toys were a decade or so away from mass production, but what *did* exist, were absolutely stunning clockwork-type little things. And from there...

This blog gives a great overview of the sort of thing I wound up looking at. 1860-1910ish, there was a HUGE amount of this kind of thing being created, these stunning little animated figures. At Disneyworld, I was pretty blown away by the animatronics, largely created forty, fifty years ago... but this stuff? 1800s. Long before anything could've possibly been digital - the "memory" of these machines is all mechanical.
That blog has a video of one of these automatons, sculpted as a little boy, that *writes*, in a gorgeous old-fashioned cursive, one of three different poems, and can also *draw*. I can't even imagine how you would plot points like that into a clockwork machine's memory...

Even more stunning, was this guy - Pierre Jaquet-Droz, 1770, made these things - one could write, one could draw, one could play a piano. And what really grabs me, about all of these, is the insane attention to detail in the animations - watch a few, and you'll see how lifelike the eye movements are, the way the figure will turn its head, or move its hand vaguely, or all the thousand little things we do without thought. Absolutely astonishing work.

...though they also creep the hell out of me. I was looking at all this, of course, shortly before going to sleep last night, and when I closed my eyes, I kept seeing ones like this - eerily accurate movements and all, but with all the mechanisms exposed, the bodies half-decayed...

I love these things, though I really don't think you can get much creepier. So they're coming into my story - Mr. Mason and his brother have much, much more wealth and influence at their disposal than the townspeople will ever have seen. The kids can have some pretty darn expensive toys.

semi-autobiographical

All my characters are, to some extent or another. I can write their interests as well as I can, because I share them - I love that moment during photo development, where suddenly a blank white page shifts and grows shades and an image appears like a ghost. I love bringing out the thousand gradations of color in a scene when drawing it, bringing to the fore the pinks in green leaves, the yellows in gray stones.

But this is my new favorite observation - about myself, as well as Kimber:

I'm an awful judge of any measurement that's bigger than my sketchbooks.


So true it's ridiculous. I hate it when directions tell you something is 100 feet, 200 feet, away. I have no idea what that looks like. Everything I do, I visualize how it would fit against an 8 1/2 x 11 sheet of paper. I was trying to visualize the 5" diameter given for a clematis flower - they vary, I know, and I have a hunch some variaties can get like 10" across or something insane, and I spread my fingers apart against the short edge of a sheet of paper. I also have a good idea of 11", 17", and 18", 24", 36". Fifteen feet, not so much.

language and names

So in today's chunk, I had to fix the fact that I had the little girl saying "okay"! I know the origins of the word are pretty murky, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't in polite language use in the late 1800s, early 1900s, which is vaguely the time period I'm working in. Also: her mis-pronounciations started with a fortuitous typo, for which I am very grateful because it helped me give her a personality. She's adorable! I love her.

Thank goodness her name checked out. I was writing in the Starbucks on campus - no internet means I can churn out a day's worth of writing in like an hour. So when I went to invent names... I couldn't check my handy-dandy reference site. But, after a few minutes' thought, I realized I could narrow it down a bit anyway - noooo Biblical names for the kids. That was a nice break-through. The father, for as little as he wants to do with the kids, would definitely have put his foot down and refused to listen to Biblical names day-in and day-out around his house.

Evelyn popped into my head, I'm not entirely sure from where, but it was pretty - and, luckily for me, #125 in popularity in 1890. Not so high that it would be a common name, but high enough to be plausible. Her brother, I had a rougher time with, and subbed in Jared for a bit, but on checking the list, I found Avery, which I liked way better. Avery and Evelyn. The names sound really cute together. :)

...I had noooo idea what to name their dog, so I kept my eyes open while scrolling through the list. The name Rollie is somewhere in the top 500 for that year, and while I am totally unable to picture a kid surviving school with the name Rollie, I can totally see a couple little kids naming their dog that.

just a note

I started out making up those classifieds off the top of my head - my handful of months working at the local Penny Saver gave me a good sense of the things. But I couldn't think of anything downright *weird* enough, so I pulled up some actual classifieds online for my area. (There are like three Penny Savers on my living room floor somewhere, but... that's all the way downstairs.)

So those last three? Are all actual ads. The jeans lady? Lists several pairs of jeans in every size FROM 5 TO 18.

I think she earns a novel in her own right.

flower meanings!

I'm keeping a running list of plants I call attention to, and will probably pull their meanings in at some point. I snagged a .txt copy of the oldest book (1885) referenced on my trusty language of flowers website, and am referring to that as I go along.

The scene I did yesterday... those are locust trees, specifically black locust trees. There were toooons of them by one of the houses I grew up in, and I was picturing a specific grove from the side of our yard as I wrote that bit. The flowers are an amazing thing, they'll come in later. But the meaning of the locust tree is "affection beyond the grave". This is the main reason the tree turns up in my Phisto stories as much as it does, but the more I think of it, the more I like the tree for its own sake. Oddly, I'd always thought of it as something of a scrub tree, but it's actually one of the hardest woods that grows in North America (though bugs eating it somewhat deters from that).

The little white flowers by the creek... I'm not entirely sure what they are, I've been nagging my poor floral genius of a mom with emailed questions about plants all week. I remember so many from my childhood, but, I don't always know the names. But one of the things those little flowers might be is Candytuft. Blooms at the right time of year I think, and the plant structure works...

The meaning? "Indifference".


I got happy chills when I read that, and instantly knew that, if it is candytuft growing there, it was planted after the locust trees, in snide rebuttal to their haunting message.

<333

spelling and an illustration

I could not for the life of me figure out how to spell "tetanus" earlier. I was writing on my dinner break at work, so I had no internet (I'll never remember to ask the boss for the wifi password, and anyway, the lack of distraction is a REALLY good thing), and I couldn't google it to get suggestions, and eeeeevery variation I could think of was still too far off-base for OpenOffice to figure out.

And, just now, I spelled "rambunctious" just fine and dandy on the first try. I and O and U all properly in their places.


I wiki'd around a bit about wrought iron fences, because I decided I wanted one. (...I wonder when that happened? I had something else in mind for the girl to find, and what happens? She finds a fence. I have no idea how.) I used a loooot of really elaborate ironwork in last year's NaNo, and I'd found some really stunning references. But I wanted to see if I could get an idea of a) how long ago the stuff was used, and b) how well it would hold up. Turns out ironwork goes back to a least 2000 BC. Good times. (The really elaborate decorative stuff came in starting in medieval times, hardcore around the 1500s.) How well it holds up... most of the things from 2000 BC have rusted away, but things in Europe have been in place a few centuries easily. Apparently there's a LOT of variation in iron, especially the farther back you go, since the whole process of working with it has had an awful lot of variables.

But the real result of my wiki wanderings? was this picture:



...that's pretty much the most incredible fence I have ever seen. Just the style of it, all swirls and things, not a trace of a straight line, just this vast organic motif... that is absolutely stunning. I'm in so much love. So, the fence my (still unnamed) main character has found, is pretty darn similar to this one. A bit smaller, and a bit more detailed, but, pretty much this one. <333