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julian_griffithProject: Christmas Story That Needs A Title
Market: Storm Moon Press, "22 Days of Yule" open anthology call
Deadline: October 15, 2012
Required length:15-20K
Final wordcount: 16,510
I didn't even post yesterday, though I wrote about a thousand words, because I was so disgusted with myself for falling into the Google Vortex. I spent most of the morning cutting and pasting the way a Christmas Eve midnight mass would have gone if the church in question was using the 1559 Book of Common Prayer; I had figured on using the 1662 edition, which was most common then, but for some reason I cannot figure out, the 1662 reading was from the Gospel of John instead of the Luke version that even I know from the Charlie Brown Christmas Special, and I wanted to use Luke. And I felt like I had to know all the words Thorne would be hearing, so I'd know what would jump out at him to think about. Guess what? I only wound up using the first and last verses from Luke. *facepalm*
That brought it up to the first sex scene. Excellent! Then the next thing to do was Christmas morning. With gifts. And, holy fuck, I got it into my head that I had to know what EVERYBODY gave EVERYONE ELSE, with like a dozen people to worry about, so I spent time looking up children's toys, and ladies' handicrafts, and books written for children that would have existed at the time. The genre was just getting started, and was really pretty didactic and awful, but one of those dull, didactic books was written by Mary Wollstonecraft, and was as full of sneaky feminist propaganda as Free To Be... You And Me, albeit without the comedy routines or charming songs. So that totally had to go in there. And all of this was to give some context to the intimacy of Rockingham and Caroline's gift to Thorne of a dressing gown. While I was at it, I put in a tiny shout-out to Rumer Godden, whose doll books I loved so much as a child: Thorne gave Sarah Pennington a(n inexpensive) wooden Dutch doll, and Sarah said she would call her Tottie.
But the part where I WROTE the Christmas gift exchange was TODAY. Yesterday was mostly dicking around on the internet -- oh, but please to call it research.
Anyway. I guess the time wasn't wasted yesterday, because today I just CRANKED along. Most of my timed bouts were between 200 and 300 words. I took one break to do the dishes, and another to eat lunch, and I had plenty of hot cups of tea, and lovely Baroque music going through my headphones the whole time... and I DID it. With wassail, and a boar's head along with the roast goose and plum pudding, and a snowball fight, and one really schmoopy scene in the hornbeam arch with a secret present and a three-way embrace. Plus they thwarted George Pennington's financial scheming, for now.
Now I'm gonna eat dinner, and treat myself to a bottle of Mexican real-sugar Coke, and look up Christmas carols to see if any of them work for titles.
I didn't even post yesterday, though I wrote about a thousand words, because I was so disgusted with myself for falling into the Google Vortex. I spent most of the morning cutting and pasting the way a Christmas Eve midnight mass would have gone if the church in question was using the 1559 Book of Common Prayer; I had figured on using the 1662 edition, which was most common then, but for some reason I cannot figure out, the 1662 reading was from the Gospel of John instead of the Luke version that even I know from the Charlie Brown Christmas Special, and I wanted to use Luke. And I felt like I had to know all the words Thorne would be hearing, so I'd know what would jump out at him to think about. Guess what? I only wound up using the first and last verses from Luke. *facepalm*
That brought it up to the first sex scene. Excellent! Then the next thing to do was Christmas morning. With gifts. And, holy fuck, I got it into my head that I had to know what EVERYBODY gave EVERYONE ELSE, with like a dozen people to worry about, so I spent time looking up children's toys, and ladies' handicrafts, and books written for children that would have existed at the time. The genre was just getting started, and was really pretty didactic and awful, but one of those dull, didactic books was written by Mary Wollstonecraft, and was as full of sneaky feminist propaganda as Free To Be... You And Me, albeit without the comedy routines or charming songs. So that totally had to go in there. And all of this was to give some context to the intimacy of Rockingham and Caroline's gift to Thorne of a dressing gown. While I was at it, I put in a tiny shout-out to Rumer Godden, whose doll books I loved so much as a child: Thorne gave Sarah Pennington a(n inexpensive) wooden Dutch doll, and Sarah said she would call her Tottie.
But the part where I WROTE the Christmas gift exchange was TODAY. Yesterday was mostly dicking around on the internet -- oh, but please to call it research.
Anyway. I guess the time wasn't wasted yesterday, because today I just CRANKED along. Most of my timed bouts were between 200 and 300 words. I took one break to do the dishes, and another to eat lunch, and I had plenty of hot cups of tea, and lovely Baroque music going through my headphones the whole time... and I DID it. With wassail, and a boar's head along with the roast goose and plum pudding, and a snowball fight, and one really schmoopy scene in the hornbeam arch with a secret present and a three-way embrace. Plus they thwarted George Pennington's financial scheming, for now.
Now I'm gonna eat dinner, and treat myself to a bottle of Mexican real-sugar Coke, and look up Christmas carols to see if any of them work for titles.
