I just wrote the final scene of Picking up the Ghost.
Total:
68,681 words
274 pages
And I’m still only half way done. I still have a half-dozen scenes that need to be finished and tied together with a subplot. Then there’s probably a hundred or so details that need to be filled in. And that’s just the first draft. From experience I figure the number of words I still need to add will be equal to the number of words that are going to be edited out during the second draft.
If the first draft is challenging physically, the the second draft is challenging emotionally. That’s where I discover some really embarrassing passages. Like a paragraph consisting of five sentences all beginning with “He went…” or a scene where a felt that detail about a character’s appearance was so important that I mentioned it four times in two pages using exactly the same words.
I guess that means I’m back at it.
I figure I have 5000-7000 words until the end but then I’ll have to go back and fill in some scenes that I skipped.
As a reward for not buying a Macbook Pro I’m getting another tattoo. I’ve been researching symbols of change that I can have permanently etched into my skin as a half sleeve.
So far I’ve found:
- The Wheel of Fortune – The Tarot card, not the game show
- Death the end of things. I should have something to counter Death.
- Nea Onnim No Sua A, Ohu, Mmere Dane, Nkyinkyim, and Sesa Woruban from West Africa
- The Yin Yang has become a tattoo cliche but as I understand it the wavy line between the halves symbolizes how what is yin one day can become yang the next. If I do use the Yin Yang it’ll be real subtle, maybe the hub of the Wheel of Fortune.
- πάντα χωρεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει – attributed to Heraclitus. It means “Everything flows and nothing is left unchanged”
- An Integral from 0 to infinity, I’m not sure what the function will be.
- The roman goddess Fortuna
- The Hindu god Shiva
Know any others?
And I’m still thinking about how the symbols are going to be arranged. My first instinct is to have them falling down from my shoulder where symbols of good change will fall down my chest, bad change down my back and ambivalent change down my arm. But I’m not sure how that will work as a static piece.
My second instinct is to have them all arranged around, and incorporated into the Wheel of Fortune.
It’s tempting to have Fortuna, dancing as Shiva with the Wheel of Fortune behind her as her halo but that’s too close to my first tat.
My grown-up vacation (no sleeping on floors or couches) with the lovely and talented,
Thursday:
- We arrived at the Berkeley hotel tired and hungry. Remained tired and hungry for over an hour while we tried to find a restaurant that was open in the afternoon.
- After some rest we walked up the the Telegraph area trying to find a bar that was open after nine.
- Lesson learned: Berkeley keeps European hours.
Friday:
- We caught a ride with the Smangs down to Mountain View.
- Had lunch with and Jim, a former co-worker from SportVision (fuck Sportvision)
- Jim gave us a ride in his red ’61 Lincoln Continental convertible up to Palo Alto.
- Riding in big old cars like that feels like riding in a boat
- We got a couple’s massage at a day spa in downtown Palo Alto, I think this is where my troubles began. During the massage I noticed my sinuses were feeling raw. Melmel suggested that the steam from the sauna might have jacked up my nose innards and I think she’s right.
- Caught up with the Smangs on the Stanford campus, got a ride back to Berkeley with a brief stop in The City to dodge traffic.
- Dinner with Jen-Jen and her new fella, Ken who seems pretty cool and not just because he knows MC Frontalot personally.
- During post-dinner tea I was informed by consensus that I looked like crap and they took me back to the room.
Saturday:
- I loaded up on cold remedies and tried to kick my cold’s ass with rest and orange juice while and played ‘Let’s dress Melissa’ at H&M.
- By the evening I was able to BART into The City and made it to The Stinking Rose for a 40 clove garlic chicken.
Sunday:
- Loaded up on DayQuil before Melmel and I got a ride into The City with and for the scheduled trip to Alcatraz [pics]. Sometime during the forest ranger’s ‘welcome to the rock speech’ the worst of my cold broke and I quite enjoyed the rest of the day and tried to push my camera’s memory card to it’s limit [the streets of San Francisco]
Monday:
- Caught lunch with Cramer, another former co-worker from SportVision (fuck Sportvision).
- Visited Comic Relief, a few book stores and some coffee and then BARTed down to the airport.
- Saw into Laurenn McCubbin while we were stuck in the security cow pen. She was on her way back home to KC, I’m sure it freaked her out, running into the vaguely familiar stranger attends all her panels every Comic Con.
- Got back to San Diego on time with is more than I can say for our bags. Mistakenly put on another flight to SD we were told promises and lies by Southwest airlines and eventually gave up and went home. I ran back down to get our bags Tuesday morning but I wasn’t able to sleep very well, I just lay in bed calculating how much replacing everything in my bag would cost.
Vacations are more fun with money, but I don’t think we’ll be staying in Berkeley again. It was further away from our points of interest than I thought it would be. Somehow, Berkeley was even far from Berkeley.
