But we still had the radio...

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a woman in possession of a full compliment of toes cannot fail to count to eleven. I do not do maths. (I'm British by the way ~ we spell it with an 's.')

Having sternly questioned myself with regard to my writing hiatus & receiving little in the way of a useful or convincing answer, I decided I need inspiration. To that end, I've decided to re~read Stephen King's marvellous book, On Writing. I must first finish The Fourth Hand by John Irving, which is deliciously macabre & sweetly romantic. I want to dislike Irving ~ he often veers toward something hinting at latent sexism, but always, at the last minute manages a tangent that saves him from my crouching wrath. And he writes superbly ~ it's a joy to read his stream of consciousness style.

And speaking of which ~ if ever a writer had SOC writing in the palm of her hand it is Virginia Woolf. But I'm taking a break from her divine prose ~ I need something other than perfection to inspire me. She's just too damn good. In my present frame of mind, I would simply sob.

Of all the not-Charlie-Browns in the world, I believe I am the Charlie-Browniest.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who has thought of this, but with the Fall Finale of GLEE on tonight, it occurred to me again: can't you just see a forlorn Kurt, alone at a piano, watching Finn leave the music room and then singing Taylor Swift's "You Belong With Me?" Yes, I realize the scenario could just as easily apply to Rachel, but Kurt needs more lead vocals.

* My LJ notifications aren't showing up in my Hotmail box. *Big grumpy sigh.*
* I am not writing much.
* (I'm writing lots of letters ~ they don't count.)
* I'm not mad about Christmas.
* The spiders have gone & I missed them.


Thank you for allowing me to grumble...

Sent off Eric's belated birthday present.
Ordered Hunter's Christmas present.
Picked up Jared and Morgyn's present.
Bought the 200 stamps I'll need to send out my Christmas cards. (Yes, I am that insane.)
Mailed the cards going overseas: Sweden, Germany, Ireland, Scotland.
Picked up my mail.

Last night, I address cards through the G's and one H. Need to make more headway on that tonight.
Watched "March of the Wooden Soldiers" last night, the Laurel & Hardy movie. I'm glad I bought that combo dvd/vcr so I can still watch the stuff I have on vhs. "Soldiers" has about as much to do with Christmas as "A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving" does, but it's a holiday season tradition anyway. Downside is: if something's on the tv, I definitely slow down in terms of writing out my cards. It's still faster than if I have the laptop on and am connected to the internet, but definitely slower than if I just have Christmas music playing. Which I think is how I will handle things tonight, once I get home from the after-work errands I need to run.

I have most of my presents for my niece and nephew and god-daughter all set to go, just a few things to pick up before Christmas Eve. Mostly, the adults want gift cards, which makes last minute shopping a bit easier.

It would never occur to me to add someone to my friends list without first reading their journal. More importantly, I pay a great deal of attention to their profile. The point of a profile is to offer some insights & useful information about a person. A certain amount of personal information (at the very least, an indication as to what floats their boat even if it's anonymity & mystery) & a list of interests.

I tend to shy away from profiles that tell me nothing, although I honour a person's right to their privacy. I'm aware that I may add someone only to discover we have little or nothing in common other than a passing moment. And I go back to my friend's profiles from time to time in case they've updated them. What I don't get is that some people evidently do not read profiles at all. Either that or they dismiss them & blatantly ignore the information therein.

That's all.

Finally! It's simple & is definitely a table rather than the 'house' I wanted. It sits on the top of the balcony wall & extends either side. I can't wait for the robins in particular to discover it. They've been hanging out wearing questioning looks because the pickings were a bit thin. The blackbirds will be particularly pleased. Last year I bought a packet of something called Berry Treat Feast which they adored. Bit pricey but I decided to buy some to celebrate the new table.

I picked up some new hangers too which I've suspended from the corners of the table & filled with peanuts & fat balls. And I've hung two more (seeds & peanuts) directly outside my kitchen window to seduce the blue tits & chaffinches.

All I have to do now is be ready with the scrubbing brush to clean off the droppings! Oh yes, & try & get through to Miss Rubberneck downstairs that the seed debris the birds fling about & which land on the grass outside her flat, will be eaten. By the birds. It's what they do. She calls it 'a mess' & tells me off. Mostly I smile & try to placate her. This year I think I shall simply ignore her.

Miss Rubberneck? The woman can look out of her back bedroom window & see what's going on by her front door. She's never got over seeing Tom leaving my place three mornings on the trot at 8.30am while he was staying with me!

Miss R: "I saw your young man!"
Me: "Which young was that then, Miss R?"
Miss R: "Oh... well... I saw him!"
Me: Well, you know how it is, Miss R, so many young men, so little time!"

In other news: I took a box of books to Waterstone's. It will take about a week.

Friday I did get a little bit of writing done. Not on the NaNo project, that's still in "WTFwasIthinking" limbo. But I worked a bit on one of my super-hero stories for STAPA in anticipation of the upcoming deadline. I need to try and get mailing comments done too, on at least one of the recent mailings, but the fiction needs to come first I think.

Saturday was fun. I drove to my sister's and then we all drove down to Mahopac for my god-daughter's second birthday. My cousin had the party at her real estate office (her boss there is nice to let her use the space on Saturdays for things like this, since my cousins' house doesn't exactly have the parking necessary for both sides of the family to gather). Fun afternoon. Of course, it was also my nephew's 12th birthday, as I may have mentioned here. And what did his favorite uncle completely forget to do? Right -- after posting "Happy Birthday to my Nephew" messages both here and on Facebook ... I completely forgot to wish him a Happy Birthday in person when I got to his house. Thankfully, I did remember as we were piling in the car to go to the party, so I think I was within acceptable time. Still, I felt bad.

I drove home from my sister's on Saturday in our first real accumulation of snowfall. The NYS Thruway and I-287 and I-80 weren't bad, just slushy (which made changing lanes interesting) and there was the usual problem of other cars splattering slush up onto my windshield and momentarily blinding me, but that only happened a couple of times. The worst parts of the trip were my sister's driveway and the roads near my house.

Still, Winter Wonderland and all that, yeah?

Yesterday was another lost day. I really need to figure out how to not let my depression get the best of me and stop losing entire weekend days to nothing. Not that the day was a complete waste -- sometime around 5pm I actually ate and went out and cleaned off the car and then addressed more Christmas cards (The C's are a long slog, what with so many Cardnos, Cornelias, Cornues, Cunninghams and others) and checked email and that kind of thing. But most of the day was spent just not wanting to get out of bed.

Ah well. Most of the weekend was good, and today is the start of a new week and hopefully I'll accomplish more as the week goes on. Need to do some holiday shopping after payday, too...

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I do get it, but struggle sometimes with the nuances of the iambic pentameter. Even Shakespeare played around with the form,( Now is the winter of our discontent, for instance) thus muddying the waters for the rest of us. I thought I'd achieved it by accident. The opening lines to my short story were ten syllables, but since I changed the name of my main protagonists at the last minute I ended up with eleven. And in any case, the rhythm was quite wrong as well, so it was a lost cause.

And I wasn't writing a poem. Or a sonnet. And if you try & work it out via the dictionary you will end up on drugs. Try it ~ I'm not lying. A foot is so not what you thought...

Were I more a poet than a prose writer, I might try & master the iambic pentameter, but as I said to a friend of mine only the other day, if life's too short to iron your knickers, where's the time for the intricacies of poetic metre?

This morning I heard an interesting debate between two well known writers about how they write. As in, physically get the words down. Ian McEwan only uses a pen in extremis. He likes the way the words look on a screen ~ pretty much as they will on the printed page he maintained (yeah, yeah.) In contrast, Phillip Henshall favours a pen, fearing words on a screen might well run away with themselves, expanding from the inside & get out of hand.

McEwan write 3,000 words a day; Henshall, 600. (He sounded as scared as I am envious!) declaring that amount of words equated to 'a novel in a month.' Quite. There was a brief discussion as to whether a novel might be pacier if it's written on a PC or if it's even possible to tell. No conclusion was reached & I doubt it myself. There was no discussion as to how creativity is affected. Again, the evidence would tend to suggest not, although the emminent Irish author Edna O'Brien's once commented, I write by hand. I do not understand how people can arrive at even a flicker of creativity by means of a computer.

Learning to work on a word processor & later a PC changed the way I write physically, for ever. The cut & paste function proved a thing of immediacy & wonder. A PC is faster & quick referencing a mere click away. And yet, I still write a great deal of original ideas by hand. In pencil & in nice notebooks. I still reach for a real dictionary when Spell Check fails (or confuses & lies ~ yes, it does) or even sometimes, from choice. I take to my bookshelves for other references rather than simply Googling. Not always, but enough to justify hanging onto so many of those books.

In the end, like so much in life, it's about choice. But I found it interesting.