Catching Up

1. I’ve been going through old comic books looking for Hostess ads from the late 1970s.  They had these one-page stories where a hero would run into a really lame villain, and be able to stop them by distracting them with Twinkies, or fruit pies, or cupcakes.  Some of them are total crack, and there’s a web archive with snarky commentary.  I got the idea to profile the villains that the Flash fought (even though there’s still a bunch of minor villains and supporting characters from canon to add), so I’ve been looking for pages to get higher-res scans.  I found 2 of 4.

The funny thing?  It turns out that the Omnivore’s 100 list I posted includes Hostess Fruit Pies because the author was nostalgic for those ads.

2. Dinner with MIL Saturday, after alenxa went to a cousin’s wedding shower.

3. Majorly dehydrated on Sunday, or something.  Tried to start going through the piles of boxes against the edge of our living room, but ended up spending the afternoon on the couch reading, sipping water.  Read sections from The Flash Companion and a comic book trade, Supergirl and The Legion of Super-Heroes: The Dominator War.  I’d picked it up months ago, before we moved, since it was a sequel to a story I’d liked that came out in 1989 (Invasion!) but hadn’t gotten around to reading it.  Not bad, but didn’t wow me either.  Fortunately felt better in time to…

4. Hit the Orange Street Fair on Sunday evening.  Passed on Abelskivers (sp) this time.  Was in line, but realized I just didn’t want them.  Agreed we have to explore Old Town Orange sometime when it’s not a fair and businesses are open.  I think the last time I did that was more than 10 years ago.

5. Responsible day today.  Groceries, Laundry, etc.

6. Interviewed the outgoing writer on The Flash last week!

Goals for this week:
1. Locate cable outlet.
2. Arrange for some sort of TV service.  The fall season is starting, and we’ll actually be watching stuff live and not just off of DVDs.

Thanksgiving Weekend

Wednesday: Scrambling to finish a section of this big web project for work so that the client could test things over the weekend, and still get out early enough to pick up alenxa when her office closed at 3. Planned to leave at 2 & hit the comic store first, but got out at 2:50. So I went straight to pick her up, and we got stuck wading through pre-TG traffic and grocery store madness. (Gripe: The express lane clearly says cash only. Why do some people insist on paying with a check anyway? (Answer: because the store doesn’t want to lose that sale, so they call over a manager to take it, and thereby inconvenience all 12 people waiting for the process — which takes 10 minutes instead of 1 for some reason — instead of inconveniencing the one person who really should have been in another line in the first place. Thus do we reward people being either clueless or inconsiderate.)) Helped Katie a bit w/ baking.

Thursday: Thanksgiving lunch w/ Katie’s family. Worked out pretty well, since it meant neither of us needed to eat dinner.

Friday: Holed up in the apartment, venturing forth only to run by the pharmacy. Re-read first 3 volumes of Scott Pilgrim & read the new one. Still holding up.

Saturday: Drove out in the Tustin Foothills/Lemon Heights area to take advantage of the really clear air and see what I could see. Got to see Catalina Island from about 10 miles inland. Also between this and a similar drive early in October, I have some interesting before & after pics of some of the hills touched by the Santiago fire. It got a lot farther north than I thought. Edit: Forgot to mention, got a kick out of driving around the wealthy enclave with “Sinister Ducks” playing on the iPod. Gotta love random.

Then afternoon & evening for a secondary Thanksgiving dinner w/ my parents & brother, who’s out visiting from Florida (but moving to San Fransisco next month). Haven’t seen BSG: Razor yet. Will probably watch it tonight.

Sunday: Ran errands, went to see Beowulf in 3D. Sushi & tempura for dinner (Maki Maki has a teriyaki chicken roll, plus everyone has veggie rolls), then minor shopping.

Monday: I think we may have finished off the leftovers, except for a turkey leg.

Somewhere in all this I took a few hours to pare down my inbox from ~650 messages to ~250, mostly by filing and deleting things I’d already dealt with or didn’t need to (though I replied to a couple of things). Probably around 40 of the remaining items are to do/to read items I sent myself. At some point I’ll need to do this with my work mailbox.

Current Mood: 😴sleepy

Writing Weekend

Mostly random stuff this morning. Read some comics. Finished Callahan’s Cross-Time Saloon. Errands in the afternoon. Late lunch at Ruby’s, which always lends itself to not needing dinner that night. Weather went from warm and sunny to gloomy and cool during lunch.

Picked up writing early evening. My goal is to hit 20,000 words by the end of the weekend, which should put me on track (20K/50K = 12d/30d = 40%). Looks like I can make it.

Concluded that the progress gauge I’ve been using here is either using something other than time to determine the goal, or just plain b0rked. It went from 13,105 yesterday to 12,896 today. Maybe it’s based on average words/day or something.

It’s odd to be writing with the only goal being word count. But it’s also oddly liberating. That’s kind of gone down now, since I’ve been establishing a world and characters, and at the very least I have to keep things more or less consistent. I guess it’s the freedom to mess up. It doesn’t matter if what I write is crap. As long as I finish it, I can revise it as much as I want later.

I had a bit of conflict insert itself into the story today. Completely unintended, but the character was acting grumpy, and started explaining why. In such a way that’s going to make things complicated for a while.

One of the big problems I’ve been having since I started to see the overall shape is that the stuff I have the best handle on comes near the end of the story. I’m enough out of practice to not have a sense of how long it’ll take to get there, but I want to get a sense of where the characters are before I start writing too far ahead.

Word Count: 17415