Projects Update

from grandteuton.blogspot.com

Well, it's been far too long since I posted anything here.

I don't know if anyone is actually interested, but I have almost completed the first draft of my second novel, and I'm pretty happy with it, really. The good part is that it's pretty well finished and the plot and scenes hang together well; the bad part is that I hate rewriting.
I don't mind revising paragraphs and sentences - I'm pretty well able to accept that the first choice of words that came to my mind isn't necessarily the best.
I don't like wholesale re-writing, however. If I wrote a scene, I generally like it, and I will resist removing it from the finished product. I'm better at adding scenes where things simply don't flow properly, or where I've left out something that the reader needs to know.

I haven't gotten back to the two cookbooks that are in my writing / editing pipeline, but I have at least collected most of what needs to go together, so I'm at the point where I can get things going pretty quickly.

The interesting thing is that November is coming soon, and we all know that's NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). I really don't think they like to count revisions as writing - that's kind of the antithesis of the "write, write like the wind!" fever of getting 50,000 words done in the course of those 30 days. I have my doubts that I can both revise / rewrite one book while pouring out another 50K words as the basis of another.

I also have to go through a thorough revision of my Mass setting. I seem to have a bunch of projects backing up right now.  Better that than no idea of what else to do, I suppose.

Some Current Projects

(from grandteuton.blogspot.com)

I'm working on a few things right now.  As I've finally gotten my great-great-grandfather's book published to Amazon (as noted here in a recent post), my thoughts are still largely in the literary vein.

• First, it's nearly November, and November brings National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo)!  So, it's back to my in progress second novel, which I really plan to finish this year (as I have for the past few).  [I'm also wondering about getting my first novel up on Amazon, but that's something to think about later.]
• Next, apart from that writing, I'm also getting back to the revision of my Mass setting.  I really like much of it, but there are a few movements that just don't quite work yet, and I think I need to revise some of the accompaniment as well.  It's for small mixed  chorus, soloists, and organ.
• I'm also working on a cookbook - well, actually I'm working on two cookbooks right now:

1. I'm scanning and transcribing my Grandma's handwritten recipes from the [handmade!] cookbook her brother made for her as a wedding present; and
2. I'm compiling my favourite  original dishes, along with stories of their creation (or other happy occurrences related to their eating).

• A tedious (but likely useful) project is upgrading our computers to Windows 7 from XP.  The bad part is that it's not a direct upgrage - I have to back up the documents and reinstall all the applications.  The good part is that they should all be happier and run faster (and the disks will be cleaner, too!).  Microsoft seems to have done a good job with the latest version of Windows, and by offering the family pack - 3 users for less than the price of two - they're likely to get a lot of people going legal. (Not that anyone ever installed the same copy of Windows on more than one machine ....)  Well done Steve and company.