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Nov. 19th, 2008 11:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lenora_roseBy a miracle, I've read some books lately.
Patrice Sarath's Gordath Wood is a much stronger story overall than it was when I critiqued it. It's also a pretty good story from the general point of view; about horsemanship, modern people adapting - or not - to a medieval world, about culture clash and some really hard choices. The cover blurb bills Lynn Romano as the main character, but there are three threads being followed (Lynn and Crae, Joe and Mrs. Hunt, and Kate, Colar, and Marthen.), and the one that will break your heart is Kate Mossland, a teenage girl from New York State struggling to survive a war camp where most of the women are camp followers or other nobodies. Lynn is tough, and while she knows she's ill-equipped for the world she ends up in, she copes as well as she can, physically. Kate adapts more - but at some very real costs, and it would be almost impossible to say she adapts Better.
The main characters are reasonably solid, with the possible exception of Joe, and that last is mostly because he isn't really given the time needed to really explore his transformation. She covered most of my rough-draft quibbles, or, more accurately, all the ones she could address without being railroaded into telling a story very different from the one she wanted to tell. It's also become much clearer which parts of the story are the parts she wanted to tell, simply by comparing draft to final.
I have one quibble in the real world setting (Doesn't there need to be a body, or enough pieces of one, when someone is charged with murder? In this case, there's only two missing persons, and a very circumstantial case. There are political strings being pulled in the background to save it from complete ridicule, but it still seemed pretty flimsy.) Most of the warfare and circumstances are realistic, in some ways decidedly grimly so.
She pulled off the trick, too, of closing it enough to please, while leaving threads for a sequel. I was a little surprised at the latter, actually, as up until WFC, I'd pretty much remembered it as a standalone. However, she's already said the sequel is delivered to the publisher. And It'll end up on my shelf whenever it comes out.
________________
The scene I started on the trip to the Regina Conference may have reached a grand total of 6k words. I'm not exactly sure, because it's partly handwritten at this point. I've been at computers vastly little, but my notebook travels with me.
I'm still working on the porcelain project I started the term with: The porcelain peacock-feather covered dinnerware set. I have finished: Four goblets and three plates. I'm working on a serving platter (Which I plan to do differently than simply a larger-scale plate) and a salad/serving bowl.) This is a REMARKABLY slow project, even by my standards of ridiculous levels of detail. It also involved about a week and a half of work on the wheel (Always fun), followed by weeks of tedium pressing feathers into molds and/or carving detail onto them. NOT FUN. But the goblets and plates so far are pretty, so i dare to think it will be worth the aversion I'm starting to feel for it all.
However, I've begun a second project in tandem; a stoneware version of the upper front point of the Flatiron building, with zeppelin and, (Still to be added) a pygmy mammoth. The Flatiron building part is done but for decoration, the zeppelin is about half done. This project is at least partly an attempt to get away from precision and the kind of overwhelming levels of detail - but much much more about going straight for the sheer whimsy, since most of my other work is also relatively serious. The Flatiron facade is hardly without detail, and I mean to not only make it look like it has detail, but like the bits I'm abstracting are the right detail. But they're much looser than usual, for me, and it's refreshing to be able to just build *Stuff*, and to shrug things off if they aren't at all precise.
It is also ******* HEAVY. There are now about two bags of clay in there. Yowza. Some of that of course will vanish once it's been fired - all the water gets sucked out and it shrinks by as much as 10%.
This is roughly what my week looks like, if I do everything:
Monday: Up at 6:45 for Work. Supper and a little breathing time - also time with my husband. Archery (Chance to see friends, also time with Colin). Mandolin practice.
Tuesday: Ceramics work until about 6:00 (earlier if I intend to have supper with Colin, which isn't often on ceramics days). Mandolin Lesson with Abacchus. Social time with Abacchus, Iulianna, and Tomaas, who is currently guesting at their house. (This last is a *major* bonus to the mandolin lesson: we'd otherwise see them at best once a month.)
Wednesday: Ceramics work until about 7:00 - usually with a break around 3:00 for food, library research, tool purchases, and general escape. (Today i did something highly unusual and sat at the computer long enough to transfer some of the handwritten scene into the actual story file. Which process isn't that straightforward, as I amend the draft a lot as I go) Then SCA Dance practice. Supper at about 10:00 pm, mandolin practice after. Right now, SCA dance practice is my main source of cardio exercise, so it's not as much of an option to miss as it sounds. And still gets missed a lot.
Thursday: Ceramics work as late as I can get away with (See above), then church choir practice at 7:30. If this doesn't happen, archery. Supper. Then a little breathing time, for reading, computer, etc. Mandolin practice.
Friday: Work. Dinner with Colin again. Then theoretically an open evening. Which means I tend to schedule it as time for Colin and I to see each other. It's also a good evening for driving lessons. Occasionally instead, I go to the university and work. Then Mandolin practice.
Saturday: Sleep in. mandolin practice if it happens at all happens now. Archery. The RPG in which I play Magda, who's shown up twice in this blog. Also an opportunity to visit several other good friends I would never otherwise see. This runs very late.
Sunday: In spite of being up until anywhere from 2:00 to 4:00, up at 9:00 for choir practice then church service. Lunch relatively fast, then SCA meeting at the university. After which I defect ASAP to the Ceramics building. Usually until 10:00 or 11:00 at night. Unless this is an evening I scheduled a driving lesson.
I put it like that, it doesn't seem quite as full. There are whole gaps in there, because I schedule myself some breathing time. When I eat dinner with Colin, I also get to watch whole episodes of Get Smart, Heroes, whatever Doctor Who and/or spinoff is current. When I eat dinner on my own (The late ones) I get reading or computer time with it. Plus, things get cancelled. (abacchus has a hand injury: no mandolin practice. Also, no RPG this week, but it happens that this week there's something else Saturday we intended to try and get to.)
Alas, too, I brought one of my ceramics projects home. so a lot of that "Free time" in evenings is taken up by watching tv (usually Stargate at this point - it needs to be something Colin isn't obliged to watch with me.) and making porcelain feathers to fit onto the platter.
Fortunately, this lasts this week and next. The last day of class is officially December 3rd, and the Critique day is December 4th. And for the last bit the work is in the kiln, so I'm on to free time (in fact, the 2nd and 3rd, I'll be sitting in University Centre part of the day to help with the Ceramics Christmas Sale. Not nearly as stressful).
The week after, i work full time, and the evenings don't change.
The next couple of weeks there's more leeway, up to the Christmas time itself, and I'm sure I'll get more clay time in, but doing more things I *want* to do again. Plus, Jeff will be in town, and there will be catching up on no end of other people (I can think offhand of at least Seven people I either haven't seen, or have barely seen, since school started.)
Patrice Sarath's Gordath Wood is a much stronger story overall than it was when I critiqued it. It's also a pretty good story from the general point of view; about horsemanship, modern people adapting - or not - to a medieval world, about culture clash and some really hard choices. The cover blurb bills Lynn Romano as the main character, but there are three threads being followed (Lynn and Crae, Joe and Mrs. Hunt, and Kate, Colar, and Marthen.), and the one that will break your heart is Kate Mossland, a teenage girl from New York State struggling to survive a war camp where most of the women are camp followers or other nobodies. Lynn is tough, and while she knows she's ill-equipped for the world she ends up in, she copes as well as she can, physically. Kate adapts more - but at some very real costs, and it would be almost impossible to say she adapts Better.
The main characters are reasonably solid, with the possible exception of Joe, and that last is mostly because he isn't really given the time needed to really explore his transformation. She covered most of my rough-draft quibbles, or, more accurately, all the ones she could address without being railroaded into telling a story very different from the one she wanted to tell. It's also become much clearer which parts of the story are the parts she wanted to tell, simply by comparing draft to final.
I have one quibble in the real world setting (Doesn't there need to be a body, or enough pieces of one, when someone is charged with murder? In this case, there's only two missing persons, and a very circumstantial case. There are political strings being pulled in the background to save it from complete ridicule, but it still seemed pretty flimsy.) Most of the warfare and circumstances are realistic, in some ways decidedly grimly so.
She pulled off the trick, too, of closing it enough to please, while leaving threads for a sequel. I was a little surprised at the latter, actually, as up until WFC, I'd pretty much remembered it as a standalone. However, she's already said the sequel is delivered to the publisher. And It'll end up on my shelf whenever it comes out.
________________
The scene I started on the trip to the Regina Conference may have reached a grand total of 6k words. I'm not exactly sure, because it's partly handwritten at this point. I've been at computers vastly little, but my notebook travels with me.
I'm still working on the porcelain project I started the term with: The porcelain peacock-feather covered dinnerware set. I have finished: Four goblets and three plates. I'm working on a serving platter (Which I plan to do differently than simply a larger-scale plate) and a salad/serving bowl.) This is a REMARKABLY slow project, even by my standards of ridiculous levels of detail. It also involved about a week and a half of work on the wheel (Always fun), followed by weeks of tedium pressing feathers into molds and/or carving detail onto them. NOT FUN. But the goblets and plates so far are pretty, so i dare to think it will be worth the aversion I'm starting to feel for it all.
However, I've begun a second project in tandem; a stoneware version of the upper front point of the Flatiron building, with zeppelin and, (Still to be added) a pygmy mammoth. The Flatiron building part is done but for decoration, the zeppelin is about half done. This project is at least partly an attempt to get away from precision and the kind of overwhelming levels of detail - but much much more about going straight for the sheer whimsy, since most of my other work is also relatively serious. The Flatiron facade is hardly without detail, and I mean to not only make it look like it has detail, but like the bits I'm abstracting are the right detail. But they're much looser than usual, for me, and it's refreshing to be able to just build *Stuff*, and to shrug things off if they aren't at all precise.
It is also ******* HEAVY. There are now about two bags of clay in there. Yowza. Some of that of course will vanish once it's been fired - all the water gets sucked out and it shrinks by as much as 10%.
This is roughly what my week looks like, if I do everything:
Monday: Up at 6:45 for Work. Supper and a little breathing time - also time with my husband. Archery (Chance to see friends, also time with Colin). Mandolin practice.
Tuesday: Ceramics work until about 6:00 (earlier if I intend to have supper with Colin, which isn't often on ceramics days). Mandolin Lesson with Abacchus. Social time with Abacchus, Iulianna, and Tomaas, who is currently guesting at their house. (This last is a *major* bonus to the mandolin lesson: we'd otherwise see them at best once a month.)
Wednesday: Ceramics work until about 7:00 - usually with a break around 3:00 for food, library research, tool purchases, and general escape. (Today i did something highly unusual and sat at the computer long enough to transfer some of the handwritten scene into the actual story file. Which process isn't that straightforward, as I amend the draft a lot as I go) Then SCA Dance practice. Supper at about 10:00 pm, mandolin practice after. Right now, SCA dance practice is my main source of cardio exercise, so it's not as much of an option to miss as it sounds. And still gets missed a lot.
Thursday: Ceramics work as late as I can get away with (See above), then church choir practice at 7:30. If this doesn't happen, archery. Supper. Then a little breathing time, for reading, computer, etc. Mandolin practice.
Friday: Work. Dinner with Colin again. Then theoretically an open evening. Which means I tend to schedule it as time for Colin and I to see each other. It's also a good evening for driving lessons. Occasionally instead, I go to the university and work. Then Mandolin practice.
Saturday: Sleep in. mandolin practice if it happens at all happens now. Archery. The RPG in which I play Magda, who's shown up twice in this blog. Also an opportunity to visit several other good friends I would never otherwise see. This runs very late.
Sunday: In spite of being up until anywhere from 2:00 to 4:00, up at 9:00 for choir practice then church service. Lunch relatively fast, then SCA meeting at the university. After which I defect ASAP to the Ceramics building. Usually until 10:00 or 11:00 at night. Unless this is an evening I scheduled a driving lesson.
I put it like that, it doesn't seem quite as full. There are whole gaps in there, because I schedule myself some breathing time. When I eat dinner with Colin, I also get to watch whole episodes of Get Smart, Heroes, whatever Doctor Who and/or spinoff is current. When I eat dinner on my own (The late ones) I get reading or computer time with it. Plus, things get cancelled. (abacchus has a hand injury: no mandolin practice. Also, no RPG this week, but it happens that this week there's something else Saturday we intended to try and get to.)
Alas, too, I brought one of my ceramics projects home. so a lot of that "Free time" in evenings is taken up by watching tv (usually Stargate at this point - it needs to be something Colin isn't obliged to watch with me.) and making porcelain feathers to fit onto the platter.
Fortunately, this lasts this week and next. The last day of class is officially December 3rd, and the Critique day is December 4th. And for the last bit the work is in the kiln, so I'm on to free time (in fact, the 2nd and 3rd, I'll be sitting in University Centre part of the day to help with the Ceramics Christmas Sale. Not nearly as stressful).
The week after, i work full time, and the evenings don't change.
The next couple of weeks there's more leeway, up to the Christmas time itself, and I'm sure I'll get more clay time in, but doing more things I *want* to do again. Plus, Jeff will be in town, and there will be catching up on no end of other people (I can think offhand of at least Seven people I either haven't seen, or have barely seen, since school started.)
