Thursday, 15 August 2002

A pretty good day's writing.

Jackie and Katy headed off around 8:00 for their classes at the Michigan Fiber Festival. Dad and I stayed home and wrote. He's wrapping up his land trust book (just checking his notes at this point). I'm working on my story.

I got about 800 words written in the morning. I wrote one hard scene and then most of one easier scene.

Looking back on it, I think the hard scene was hard because I wasn't sure what it was supposed to accomplish. I probably would have been better off just leaving a placeholder, and then coming back to it after I'd written the next couple of scenes and had a better idea of just what needed to be set up in that scene. Still, I'm happy enough with it.

For lunch my dad and I went to Scooters, a hot-dog restaurant in Scotts. After that we went to my dad's woods and hiked around a bit. There were two trees that had come down in recent heavy winds, one a sugar maple and the other a pretty big basswood. The basswood already had a bunch of root sprouts, some ten feet tall. I marveled aloud at that (it seemed like incredibly fast growth), but my dad pointed out that a lot of the basswoods had root suckers several feet tall.

We stopped at the used bookstore on the way home. (I bought The Well-Favored Man by Elizabeth Willey for $2.40. I'd read it from the library and liked it.

Jackie and Katy came home in the late afternoon, Jackie saying that she'd learned how to spin with her Charka (one of the classes she'd taken) and also carrying a gorgeous small basket woven from roving (unspun wool). Her weaver friends are going to be very jealous of her new basket-making skills. I took some pictures, but I neglected to bring the special cable to get the pictures into the computer, so I won't be able to post them until I get home.

We had dinner at Bilbo's, always my favorite.

Besides starting the Willey, I've also started reading the Year's Best Science Fiction edited by Gardner Dozois. There are more than usual that I haven't already read, because I fell so far behind in my reading last year. (There'll probably be more next year as well, because I'm still behind.)