Tree was up all night, tree was lit this afternoon, tree was decorated this evening. Operative word here: was.

Tree fell over on youngest daughter about 10 minutes ago. Probably because she pranced round as she placed the ornaments. First time we've ever had one fall after we placed it on the holder. Now it's back up, propped by the wooden corner pieces from a box of clementines.

Youngest daughter's replaced the ornaments that fell during the collapse, but she's hightailed upstairs in case the tree decides to take another dive.

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Edited to add:Melissa believes one of the cats was attempting to climb the trunk and probably pushed it over. Which means it was near to falling, because the cats are tiny mousers not large predators.

Two accounts of the incident involving Dr. Peter Watts, Canadian science fiction writer, and his problem at the U.S. border in Port Huron.

First, from BoingBoing. Second, from Peter's own site at rifters.com.

I believe I've only met him one time, possibly at the Toronto Worldcon or at one of the Confusion conventions, but he impressed me as a well-spoken and intelligent person. The same impression I get from nearly every writer I know. Plus, he's a friend of Bear and I trust her judgement.

What bothers me most about this is the idea that he would get released into a snowstorm--and this week's first brush with winter was nasty.

Jotted down some quick notes while the phones were quiet this morning and hopefully I'll get a new short story written in the next few days. Still not sure whether it will turn out scary or uplifting. Or a mash-up of the two.

Credit for this one goes to youngest daughter and her muse. It was nearly time for her bus to arrive this morning, but today also happens to be garbage day, so I kept hearing the one and thinking it was the other. Youngest daughter blamed my imagination. We proceeded to riff off each other.

The iron is hot, and I've got four days to write between now and the UWG meeting on Monday.

Cable went out right after the eulogy, so we missed Criminal Minds last night. There was much gnashing of teeth. :-/

Tonight's dinner should consist of spouse's first attempt at making risotto.

Happy birthday. Hope you have a very nice one. :-)

I kept thinking, after posting about Jaime's birthday yesterday, that yours would not be a day of infamy. It's funny what one day can do as opposed to another. My eldest was born on February 1st, and I always think of Groundhog's Day when it's time for her birthday. People's minds (or mine, at least) are strange places.

Happy birthday. :-)

You know all is right with the world when your oldest daughter IM's to say "I love you" and uses ALL CAPS, and the only reason they're shouting is they want to tell you how they feel.

The new year draws near, and there are several things I'd like to do to finish on a good note.

First, continue with the exercise and diet. So far, I'm pleased by the results. I broke out a new notebook today for my food journal; I filled the last pages on the initial one over Thanksgiving break. Ideally, I hope to see some more losses. Even though I didn't get a chance to exercise with the Jillian Michaels Wii program during vacation, I still recorded a pound or two lost. If I follow the routine without a skipped day I can count on 23 workouts. The diet is becoming easier, so I think weight loss will require more and stronger workouts.

Second, December is a long month and, holidays notwithstanding, that means 31 days to write. So, I want to come close to breaking 100 pages. I've got a week off mid-month, so I hope to rack up good numbers then. Best-case scenario, that will compensate for any writing time I lose to the holidays when merriment matters more than work. :-)

Thanksgiving vacation is over and I'm back to work and looking forward to a December without interruptions. Technically -- we still need to put the house back into order after yesterday's carpet cleaning. That will probably take a good week or so as we do early (extremely early) spring cleaning.

Under The Dome is one of the better Stephen King novels of recent years.

I enjoyed Blaze, with its homage to Of Mice and Men and what I considered a dash of Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men. Yet, I still feel ambivalent toward Lisey's Story, which had its moments, but had a better book cover; it was a tough read. Duma Key, on the other hand, offered tons of memorable scenes. Which says a lot, since the last first-person novel he wrote and that I read (that I can remember) was Christine and it was another book I didn't enjoy. I think because it didn't seem the narrator (whose name I can't even recall and won't take the effort to research) didn't seem to change throughout the course of the novel. You could tell it in the way the character related events; he sounded like an ass, offended that the universe dared to spoil his teenage years. King's use of first person in Duma Key showed a range of emotion and it was a pleasure to sink into the head of Edgar Freemantle (no problem remembering that character's name).

So far, I'm a little more than a week into reading Under The Dome, more than a quarter through its 1,000-plus pages, and the experience reminds me of those days when I sat down and read non-stop. The book builds a hell of a lot of momentum in a few short pages. It's difficult to put down. My muse is wearing her plot hat, trying to figure out what's going to happen and why things started in the first place (even analyzing the cover for nuances, for heaven's sake); it's a rush trying to finish while I still appreciate how well King builds character and shows different places.

For example, one of the main characters references our sitting President as the "Blackguard-in-Chief," as well as a "pro-abortion son-of-a-buck" and "you monkey." I don't know King's political affiliation, and it doesn't much matter, because whatever his beliefs, I applaud his audacity. Just ... wow. :-)

I would be remiss if I didn't wish lotusice a happy birthday. Hope it's a very good one. :-)

Less than a week on Twitter and I'm realizing it's functionality is akin to standing in the middle of a crowded convention party and overhearing umpteen different conversations at once. You miss a lot of context and should speak when spoken to.

Project: Sacrifices
New Words: 500
Present Total Word Count: 4,250 words
Goal: 125,000 words

Things Accomplished in Fiction: Smoothed out some setting descriptions. Worked out how to write from a dog's viewpoint and create a pack mentality.

One complaint I heard from the UWG on Monday was how the pacing seemed too fast. I know part of that is due to the shorter chapters, but I'm going to leave any changes along those lines until I'm through with Draft Zero. My writing style tends toward the lyrical, but I'm pulled by inclination toward "popcorn" reading, as evidenced by my fascination with the pulp reprints (and now Under The Dome, which I picked up on Saturday). You can probably gather this is one of the reasons I'm calling this book a fusion of Charles de Lint-Stephen King. So the complaint is valid, but it tells me I'm on the right course. Which is one of the reasons I've focused on smoothing out my settings. I want to do a better job creating the pieces that will let readers visualize my scenes. Then they're mine and along for the ride.

Thanksgiving holiday will be all about plotting out the next section. I think I need to deal with the dog vs. mower aftermath while introducing some other plot threads, especially those that build the back story. The main part stretches forward from early summer to early winter. Another part focuses on things that happened before current events (and one of which I used as a two-page prologue).

17 / 500 pages. 3% done!

Things Accomplished in Real Life: I'm six weeks into my new diet and workout. Still only about a dozen pounds to show for my effort--except that's only as far as the scale is concerned. I had to switch to a smaller belt for my pants, shirts hang looser and my face seems quite a bit thinner compared to what it looked and felt like before my birthday back in October. I'm keeping the calorie intake under control, but I need to get my exercise down. Two or three days a week isn't enough; I need all five.

I can't believe I did it ... but I follow a few accounts there and it would be nice to comment. So, I bit the bullet and set up StephenWNagy this evening.

Project: Sacrifices
New Words: 1,000
Present Total Word Count: 3,750 words
Goal: 125,000 words

Things Accomplished in Fiction: The word and page count doesn't look like much of a jump for a week, but I did finish the second chapter and start the third. So, I feel good, if only because I believe I did a serviceable job mapping out the action in the scene. Mad dog vs. lawn mower isn't as easy to write as you might think. :-)

Third chapter should run shorter than the second as it leads into the fourth. I'm mirroring the setup I used in the prologue when I write the fourth, stepping back into a third person omniscient to relate some back story and hint at developments of which the characters are unaware.

15 / 500 pages. 3% done!

Things Accomplish in Real Life: Survival sums up the past week. Melissa sprained her knee at work and youngest daughter was diagnosed with vertigo late last week. High point was the weekend visit by eldest daughter and boyfriend #2 to celebrate youngest daughter's 14th birthday.

Fell off the exercise wagon while dealing with the low points, but I maintained the diet. And I think about working out. Good thoughts. Melissa's helped a lot this week, getting me back on track by suggesting and making time for me to work out. I think she's jonesing off the change as much as I am. :-)

Muse is up and running because of the work I've done the past few weeks on Sacrifices, but she latched onto an idea today after some comments I made to a friend's post. Jotted down the bare bones for a short story. Just the first few ideas--stuff about words and ideas, genesis and entropy--but there's not even a title hanging out a shingle yet. I've got to give credit where credit is due. LJ is the next best thing to face-to-face conversations for me.

Heck of a week since I last posted, lots of highs and lows on the personal front with the lowest hitting yesterday when Melissa sprained her knee at work. At least, that's the current diagnosis. She goes back to urgent care Thursday afternoon for a followup. She's my trooper, though. While she's in pain, she's also a strong woman, which is one of the reasons I love her so much.

Personal matters can wait for later in the week.

Tonight's observations follow a literary trend, courtesy of Terry Goodkind and syndicated television. Several months back I started to watch Legend of the Seeker on Hulu. I tried to follow the series when it premiered earlier in the year, but immediately lost interest because of how it diverged from the source material. I enjoyed Wizard's First Rule when it came out. It seemed different from the fantasies I'd read at the time. Yet, I couldn't make it many pages into its sequel--Stone of Tears--when it published. I wanted to read it, based on my experience with the first book. I couldn't muster interest, despite the enjoyment I felt reading WFR.

This second run at the show offered enough to keep my attention. Enough so that I'm reading WFR again in anticipation of watching the second season and finally reading the second book. This second run, though, isn't going as smoothly as my first experience, and I realize my problem is Goodkind's style. He uses what I can only describe (appropriately enough) as "safety words." He details everything so you know where you stand. And that's a bit much to stomach over hundreds and hundreds (and hundreds) of pages. It's not the same as Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time, where a lot happens in the span of pages; Jordan juggled a cast of several dozens. It's not the same as George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire, which gives readers multiple viewpoints to accompany its epic scope.

And it seems to me "safety words" inform the differences between literary and genre fiction. Literary works offer lots of those outs to readers, leading them through an experience from point A to point B. It's an exploration of charted territory, and readers aren't in danger of getting lost. Genre fiction colonizes. I think this is one of the reasons books such as Cormac McCarthy's The Road work. They're the closest the literary world can come to our strange highways.

Give me genre, every day and in every way.

Happy birthday, Kelly!

Hope to see you next year, either at AdAstra (if I can swing that) or at World Fantasy.

Forgot to add in my darling from today's report on Sacrifices. It's the first bit of strangeness since the death goddess in the prologue--and the feral dogs and lawn mower fight--so I wanted to make sure to offer a sample in its glory.

Glory being a relative term as this is draft zero unedited weirdness. :-)

The old ones within the pack knew obedience. Each had followed a two-legs at some time in the past. Some had even belonged to packs of two-legs.