Wednesday, 05 November 2003

When I said "Back to work tomorrow," in yesterday's entry, I meant back to work on my story, of course. I'm still on vacation.

And I did get some work done. I'm at 2500 words, so that's 800 new words today, two new scenes.

I suspect a lot of this text is going to get dropped before the final version. I'm kind of feeling my way along. There are various things that need to happen--stuff to foreshadow, characters we need to get first glimpses of, the hero's current emotional state to show, various cool stuff to throw in just because they're cool. Once I'm done, I expect, I'll see a bunch of this was unnecessary. But getting it down gives me something to work with later.

The hero has just boarded the zeppelin. Things are about to get exciting!

I also got in a nice walk and did some basic maintenance. I made a fresh backup of my documents. I tidied up my pen drawer. Stuff like that.

Clarion classmate Rick Polney reports that issue #13 of Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet is out. I spotted a thumbnail of the cover on their website, so I grabbed that for my bibliography page. It's a beautiful cover by Mieke Zuiderweg--take a look.

Less than a week after Jackie and I started dating, I wanted her to come over and she was planning to go home and get some sleep. I suggested that I could cook dinner while she took a nap at my house. And that's what I did.

Cooking dinner wasn't a big deal. I had been a bachelor for a long, long time; I knew how to cook dinner.

I don't remember everything I fixed, but the main course was a rock cornish game hen.

I remember that Jackie was very impressed. Later I heard her tell somebody that I'd fixed her dinner, and she made a big deal out of how I did the whole thing--she just slept. I was surprised about that detail making such an impression on her, but now I understand. I'd done that in my own kitchen. Now that it's her kitchen, I always need help finding things. It's tough for me to prepare an entire meal without having to ask her where something is.

This comes to mind now because I'm fixing dinner tomorrow. She read somewhere that it's "men cook dinner" night or something. (She didn't really need an excuse--I'm always willing to cook.) (She tells me it was in the apartment complex newsletter that had many bogus holidays every month.) Anyhow, remembering the rock cornish games hens I cooked that time, that's what I'm cooking this time as well.