Welcome to my perfumed garden

All very boring - no need to comment.

ETA: Hilary rang an hour ago, Mum's home - she's been in for hours having test after test... Tis not a clot, it is edema which is, of course Not Good, but a to-be-expected occasional complication of heart failure. They've decided there's no immediate cause for alarm and they're not keeping her in (usually they do at the drop of a hat, so I'm taking this as good news), they've adjusted her meds. Hilary says Mum seems fine and there's no need to go rushing over.

Anyway. It means I can keep to my work schedule, which is... good. I guess.

On a Sunday! And no one to get me a Rolex. (o:

I'm working on my first two chapters; re-writing, editing, shunting things around. I've given up on the needy agent for now;  concentrating on Tina Betts at Andrew Mann who worked so hard to get my novel published last time; all they want is a synopsis and my first 50 pages which is, like - normal for a first submission! 

I was dreading working on Chapter One because I knew - thought I knew - that it was terrible. And it was, a bit (o: - badly overwritten, anyway and confusing; the structure was all over the place. So, I've been snipping away; deleted a good three thousand words (O:! Honestly, the opening chapter should only be about 3,000 words! LOL) moved things around a little. The good (I hope) bit about dealing with the toilet on a buckets of water a day now comes at the start of the chapter and not halfway through, after a ton of irrelevant history and...  I'm actually pretty pleased with the end result. There was some good stuff in there; you just couldn't see it for all the dreck it was floating in.

I'm working on chapter 2 today; want to get that finished so I can get the submission in the post tomorrow, before the Government has a chance to close our PO (oops. Little bit of politics. Ignore it and it'll go away). Then start work on that other submission. Experience has taught me that you need at least 3 approaches on the go at once. It'll take the quickest of them a month to get in touch - usually it's 2 to 3 months before you hear back, and that's usually  your ms (unread) and a bugger off  letter, so you need to keep a few irons in the fire.

Those of you awaiting fic...  next week. I promise. No, really; I mean it. I do...

Coffee and a chocolate digestive. I'm halfway through revising chapter one; oh God, what a horrible mess that was! In the past four hours, I've deleted, re-written, re-inserted and re-deleted at least 4,000 words. But I'm getting there, with the invaluable aid of  beloved Cuba Mapa, for when I forget little details like, where in the heck is Jaruco? ::G::

OK. It's happening. Slowly, with a lot of head-shaking and despair, but progress is being made.

Coffee, then on to Santa Clara and the tren blindado... Halfway to the end, already!  ::G::

I haven't been able to do any writing all week, due to the re-working of the bathroom but made up for it this morning with 4, 275 words on the road to Santiago, meaning I now have an estimated 59% of my book written.

Doing a little Google search on the places I visited, I found the lyrics to the Buena Vista Social Club song, Chan Chan, which made me grin:

De Alto Cedro voy para Marcané
Llego a Cueto, voy para Mayarí

- the exact same trip Maria and I made, only we did it in reverse; we started out in Mayari and finished up in Alto Cedro, trying to hitch a ride to Santiago. I know the song well, I think everyone does, but I'd never bothered to listen to the lyrics before.

Anyway, that's enough work for one day, I think. I might have a spot of lunch and make a start on one of my fics.

In which I did some heavy editing of yesterdays chapter, filed the gay/cowboy bar bit which I thouht wasn't too good, but which m'darlin' Alibongo says is fine (thanks for reading, hon!) and wrote another 1, 937 words about the Devil Bird, aka Napoleon the Rooster of Beelzebub, and hitching rides in Cuba (all very regimented and efficient in a lacklustre, lazy, Cuban sort of a way).

Meaning, I am now...
Past the halfway mark! Yay! - Assuming the thing stays at 90,000 words, which I'm starting to doubt.

In other news, it snowed a bit, I went out for a bracing walk and got an email from Maria!!! O:!

Maria is my fellow traveller (in so many ways ::BG::) in the very book I'm writing right now. I haven't heard from her in years, and right when I'm writing this book, the very day after I rooted out old pictures of the gurl (cos I was feeling all nostalgic an' that), she emails, right out of the blue.

I feel the psychic vibes are strong, right now.

She's living in Peru, the jammy cow. Here's a picture of her from when we were in Camaguey and this was our local store.

http://pics.livejournal.com/gillyp/pic/000156q0

And posting Wind Whispering and Chasing Rainbows to 852 has been nothing but a joy; I've been getting really beautiful feedback since I did, and not a sniff of a complaint that (whisper it oh so quietly) they're neither of them, really slash.

Been working steadily; wrote 1, 936 words, including the tricky bit with the transvestite and his gorgeous boyfriend, the bar full of gays and cowboys and the transvestite + gorgeous boy waking me up with their noisy lovemaking - all of which has been eluding me for days, so I'm not displeased.

It is, however, going dark; too late, now, for a walk. I've missed a lovely day that will never come again, holed up in here, curtains drawn, tapping away on a laptop. What kind of fool am I?

1, 634 words about a long, hot walk and being thought a hero when I was really just a sweaty wuss.

41,879 / 90,000 (46.5%)

I'm almost half done! O:!!

I've been working on my book since 6.30am; beavering away at chapter one - which I never write first; if I do, it's never right for some reason and I always have to go back and basically re-write it all, so experience has taught me to start somewhere in the middle, and when that's going well, when the 'voice' is flowing, that's when I go back an do the opener.

( Follow the cut for bookish ramblings )

I'm just feeling pretty pleased with myself and feel the need to share. ::G::

See, I'm writing this book. It's about my time in Cuba, which spanned the time from when the USSR was still very much around, through the fall of the Berlin Wall , through the ensuing riots and unrest and thousands leaving on rafts (and floating home as bloated corpses more often than not) - and out the other side to what the Government calls 'The Special Period in Peacetime', and most Cubans call 'total economic meltdown. Help. Help. We are all going to die, most probably of boredom'. 

But, I thought all of the above might be a bit much for me  ::G::  So I narrowed it down to the events of a single journey (which is actually an amalgam of 3 journeys) across the eastern side of Cuba; very rural, very Not-Havana, and include stories that would illustrate what was going on in those weird times of the Periodo Especial. Lots happened on these trips! - so weird, wonderful and screamingly funny - the people so charming and kind - I haven't had to make a thing up.

TBH, I really did think it would write itself. It didn't. Man, I have STRUGGLED with this thing; it just refused to happen! When I was able to write at all, funny stuff wasn’t funny and sad stuff was just dull and tedious and I started to despair.

Then, a couple of days ago, after posting a bit of my latest TS fic and with the writery juices still flowing, I started writing a random bit of the book - about a hellish bus trip across the Sierra Cristal Mountains - and it flowed! - like drops of heavenly rain. :-D

So, I've stopped writing it as a continuous narrative now - ie, starting at the start and going on till the end. I'm writing each individual little story as a separate entity, whole and complete unto itself, and that's working very, very well. Later, when it's more or less finished, I'll start with the real narrative and link all the bits together. It's coming along just great - I'm churning out three stories - which amounts to around about 2 to 3 thousand words - a day; progress is being made - with any luck, I'll have the first draft finished by the time I go on my Permaculture course in July.

So I'm feeling pretty pleased with myself. Big grins all round - big gin and tonix would be better still, but it's only 3pm and I still have to pack my bag for the weekend trip to alibongo's and work on the next bit of that TS story I've almost finished.

But I expect alcohol will play some part in my evening. It usually does.