Advent of November

Lord, have mercy! My house is a demolition zone, starting today. Breaking up old tile to lay new tile. The noise is horrendous. How will I write under these conditions? Noise-canceling earphones channeling some ambient sounds. I hope that will do the trick.

In celebration of silence, this November poem:

*sigh* That does the trick.

One . . . Step . . . Closer

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Ugh! Today was one super-long day. I realized how large my living room is when we hauled out the furniture a couple of months ago for renovations. It's even larger when one is scrubbing, Cinderella-style, with a sponge and bucket, washing up a mess you made on purpose. Yes, at last, we finished our stone wall with amazing chemicals, power tools, and painstaking labor. This week I got to prep the concrete floor, and today I got up early, turned off the air conditioner and opened the windows, so (hopefully) I could be finished by the time the temperature reached 100, dressed up like an explorer to Mars and started spraying acid all over my floor. Two coats of Golden Wheat, two coats of English Red in spotty, decorative patterns, and accents of Green Lawn (which is sorta turquoise-ish) in small puddles here and there.

My acne does not like rubber masks in humid heat. My lungs don't like it when I take the rubber mask off. What's a girl to do? Because I'm a (somewhat more) practical adult now, I chose practicality over vanity and left the mask on until I removed myself from the icky acid fumes. This evening my sister came over and she, my husband, and I scrubbed and mopped and sloshed all the acid into buckets, then celebrated with spaghetti and (well-deserved) screw drivers.

The floor still looks weird because the acid stain that soaked into the concrete looks powdery, with little color. So all day tomorrow I get to do the fun stuff, which is roll down the sealer. The color will pop, the floor will look perpetually wet, and I get to move my furniture back into my living room. It will feel good to have my house back in order. The only step left is picking out a color for the walls. Once, the idea of painting all that wall space sounded intimidating. Tonight, it sounds like small potatoes.

Once the sealer is dry, I'll try to remember to take pics and post before and after shots.

For now, I'm exhausted in the best way possible. After a day of hard work and much accomplishment. I mean, somehow I even managed to make progress on the novel project. Cool!
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Progress And An Award!

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Progress is everywhere. Slowly but surely, the wall we've called Jackson has begun looking like stone again. We hope to knock even more paint away today. We shall conquer! In the meantime, the novel project is inching forward as well. A slow mighty galleon with all her sails unfurled flees time who chases her. That's a pathetic metaphor, but can anyone tell I've been researching old ships for this segment?

THIS WEEK'S PROGRESS:
Pages Revised - 11
Pages Cut - 7
New Scenes - 2
Items Researched - Naval battles, 18th Century. Only problem is, my novel takes place before a gun powder age, so adaptations in weapons is lots of fun. Primary resource: Patrick O'Brien's Navy: The Illustrated Companion to Jack Aubrey's World, by Richard O'Neill, editor. Next step: read a Jack Aubrey novel.
Bad Things That Happened - sails on fire is never good
Good Things That Happened - Athna's lure worked

In other news, Monica Mansfield of Storytelling & Me graciously bestowed upon me this blogger award! Cool!
Seven things about myself:
1. I collect prints of Waterhouse and Leighton art.
2. I've never read a Twilight novel or an Eragon novel, nor do I intend to.
3. I love the American Girl dolls.
4. I used to want to be an airplane pilot.
5. I'm terrified to venture into water where I cannot see what's under my feet.
6. I'm prone to acne, despite being 30-something. :(
7. The last name of my penname is a combination of my middle initial and my father's name.

Now to pass it on. I bestow the Irresistably Sweet Blog Award to:

1. (Anyone else having trouble with their followers not appearing on their page? When the follower service is functioning again, I will choose award winners.)
2.
3.
4.
5.
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Random Happiness

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I just feel happy today, so I think I'll post random good stuff.

It's very encouraging when one's small success inspires others to take a step in the same direction. Once I posted on LegendFire that "A Mournful Rustling" had been accepted by Dead Robots' Society, another of our members hopped on board and readied a story to submit to them. Another mentioned doing the same. I hope she does. I hope submissions stay open so they both have time to revise and send their work in. It's my greatest joy to know that all the time and learning and painful decisions (and often biting my tongue) that go into administrating and moderating a writing community may help some folks achieve their dreams.

Renovations: inching forward. Experimentation with chemicals plus sandblasting, we hope, will finally remove white paint from natural stone. At least, we think it's paint. It may actually be some alien substance engineered to drive earthlings mad. It's war now. There's no turning back. We shall conquer!

Reading: On Guard by William Craig. Apologetics. Defending one's faith with reason. Yikes. Apparently it can be done. Chapter three was a wicked piece of brain work. Cosmological defense of the existence of God. Or an introduction to it. Some of the points I can grasp; others, not even close. The last pages require knowledge of subatomic particles, believe it or not. Well, I thought, if that is what's required for me to defend my faith, I'm doomed. On the other hand, the average Joe on the street who asks me, "How can you believe in an all-knowing, all-powerful invisible God who lets all these terrible things happen to us?" probably won't know the ins and outs of subatomic particles either to be able to argue that aspect with me. So I gave up trying to understand what the heck chapter three was about. I hope chapter four is more on my level. I doubt it, but we'll see.

Also reading some free material from Smashwords that I've downloaded onto the Kindle. Some of it is really worth reading. Some of it ... well, I really wish the authors had submitted the material to LegendFire for crits. They went to all the trouble of formatting manuscripts for publication, even perfected SPaG, but, well, the story I'm reading right now started out too late, with a hook like five pages in, instead of five sentences in, and I'm not sure I'll finish it or not. Shame that.

Novel project: Typing in the revisions made to another fat section of paper. I'm making the story stronger, I'm sure of it now. But all the small changes are adding up to make big ones farther down the road. Snowballs and avalanches!

Hmmm ... better stop now and go work on my floor ... or walls ... or ceiling ... or something.
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Snags

I'm actually getting to write in the middle of these renovations, which is a pleasant surprise. I suppose it's because we've hit a snag in our progress. The ceiling is almost painted (hubby working on the high peak right now, actually), and this weekend would've been perfect timing to strip the white paint off the stone fireplace (stone fireplace that is almost as long as the entire living room, by the way), but machinery is machinery and it breaks or malfunctions or ... or ... or. So the present state of living room is:

- Gorgeous ceiling, check
- Ladders galore, check
- Paint supplies strewn everywhere, check
- Bare concrete floor, check
- Fireplace stones that are still as white as ever, check (by the way, what idiot paints natural stone in an attempt to hide it?)
- Walls that are still sage green, check
- Furniture still piled into dining room, check (makes for a great maze for three curious cats)
- White concrete dust on all surfaces, check (I've cleaned my kitchen surfaces at least, so they are usable again)

The only positives of all this are (1) I no longer have to climb onto very tall ladders with a paint brush in one hand and a bowl of paint in the other, (2) I'm getting to type revisions on the novel, and (3) I appear to have adjusted to the chaos and am no longer suffering from anxiety at having my house in shambles.

I have only to remind myself that I still have a house that is intact (see post below). So its state is irrelevant. Also, if I become too frustrated with the snail's pace and the topsy-turvy condition of my living space, I can always go punch away at my new punching bag. It's pink. It came with pink kickboxing gloves and pink handwraps. Whacked around on it for about five minutes earlier today, and I feel marvelous. Every girl needs one. :D
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