When a person’s passionate about what they do, it can make for some pretty obsessive behavior:
– My eating’s been on the scant side this last week. At my day job, I’ve been skipping lunch, opting instead to munch a handful of crackers out of the cache of edibles I keep in my desk so I won’t have to stop writing. And at home, I’ve been bolting my meals so I can get back to work.
– My sleep’s been patchy, and I haven’t particularly felt tired–although, admittedly, Adderall’s a great short-term sleep replacement. I went to bed well past midnight last night and woke before my alarm, eager to read fosteronfilm‘s feedback on my story and start on the first draft pass.
– I’ve been irritated with the driving portion of my commute, even though the roadways have been relatively uncongested (for Atlanta), because all I’ve wanted to do is get on the train as fast as I can so I could open up my laptop and get writing again. And I’ve generally been short-tempered and cranky at anything and everything that’s gotten in the way of me writing.
But finally, the story’s at first draft. I’m drained, strung out, and euphoric. But I think it might be decent . . . I hope. Next up, sending it out for critique.
Writing Stuff
Published:
– The Pseudopod podcast of “Wanting to Want” is up. Actually, it went up last week, and I didn’t realize until yesterday, when I got a note from the reader, Tabitha Smith, saying she liked the story. Still haven’t listened to it (see above re: obsessive writing), but I’m looking forward to doing so. Although I glanced at the comments and they’ve been less than glowing so far.
New Words/Editing:
– 900 words, a title change, a rewrite/editing pass, and “Fire Rabbit of the Clan of Bótù” is at first draft. I’d like to cut it down, since it’s at 9400 words, but at this point, I’m not sure what to cull. Hoping something bubbles up in critique.
Caught a rather embarrassing blunder that I’m glad I detected before anyone else did, and certainly before I submitted it. There are not two weeks between a first quarter moon and a full moon, only one–at least on this planet. Whoops. But, all fixed now.
And I’m waffling on which romanization style to use with regard to my characters’ names. I’m using the Hanyu Pinyin transliteration system, which is the standard of Mainland China, but it doesn’t normally use hyphens, instead stringing syllables together to make a single “word” and/or separating them with a space. However, I’m wondering if hyphenating would make it clearer that my characters’ names are chunks to be spoken as a unit, rather than a Western-style first and last name. However, hyphens are typically only used in Taiwanese names, which are romanized with Wade-Giles, not Pinyin. I’d like to make the hyphenating consistent with the romanization style, but Wade-Giles just bites.
Meh. I’m undoubtedly overthinking this. In my experience, native Chinese speakers don’t particularly care how their language is mangled into English. Hell, my mother spells my stepdad’s given name as a single word, and he spells it as two–which drives me nuts when I’m emailing them, as I don’t want to, y’know, commit the faux pas of spelling my stepdad’s name wrong. But if they think how his name is transliterated to English is too trifling a matter to come to a consensus on between them, it’s probably not something I need to wring my brain over for my story. As fosteronfilm pointed out when I tried to explain to him my dilemma, it’s not like anyone would notice (or care) either way.
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. Shiny. Would’ve liked to have gotten it last week, but still. Shiny.
