kittens

books & cats

I just got a box of books from Amazon, most of what I bought with my birthday Amazon certificates, though a couple more are arriving separately. Amazon is tricksy like that. And one can never have too many books.

But yay, books! I decided to stack up most of my to-read pile, consisting of this order, my last Amazon order, and another birthday book.

Mmm… books. This is probably pretty indicative of my taste in books, too. And it pleases me that this pile is oddly color-coordinated. Not sure what order to tackle them in, though. I’ve started Tam Lin but haven’t gotten very far, and I’ve wanted to read Graceling & The Hunger Games for ages. I might make tea later and read the first few pages of things and see if anything refuses to be put down.

(Also in this photo: several Nick Bantock postcards, Little Miss Sunshine, a Treasury of Victorian Designs & Emblems, the Tarot of the Magical Forest & a stack of happy-face Post-its. Cause this is the kind of stuff that collects on top of my printer. Except the postcards, the wall is their natural habitat.)

And of course, since I have a now-bookless Amazon box, it is currently full of cat:

Though since I took that photo Tessa has curled up to the point where her head is no longer visable and it looks like a box full of fur.

By erin, ago

in lieu of content, bucket.

I should probably polish my nails so I don’t chew them too much while waiting to hear back on queries and such. Am trying to distract myself with working on other things. I have court cards to sketch and books to read and a sprawling novel-in-progress about a subterranean library to work on.

But I really don’t have much to say or post or whatnot at the moment. So here, in lieu of actual interesting blog content, picture of Bucket sitting on the rug in the studio:

Because Tessa gets too much of the kitty picture glory. Since she’s a camera whore kitten and all. Bucket is shy.

By erin, ago

happy towel day!

Trapped the wonderful land of editing and synopsizing, but I know where my towel is.

Since I am busy being a hoopy frood and trying to condense a non-linear narrative into a cohesive synopsis, here, watch Maru with the Big Box, because it is possibly the best thing ever:

By erin, ago

small things

  • Met a small cat with no name today. She is a sweetheart, kind of crazy and kind of sweet and likes to lick fingers with her sandpaper tongue. I meant to take my camera and completely forgot, but she was a bit too quick for photo ops anyway. She’s mostly white with a fair amount of orange, as though a marmalade cat fell most of the way into a pool of marshmallow. We tried to help with naming but to no avail, hopefully she will tell my parents what her name is soon, though she seems to do just fine being called Kitty.
  • I have a wonderful little project that I’m working on that I am ever so excited about. Will be working on it for the next couple months and will likely debut it for my birthday in July and then it will be ongoing for, well, I’m not sure how long. We’ll see. A good long while, at least. Have a lot of work to do on it before then, but it will be fun work and I’m looking forward to it.
  • I have chocolate cake and red wine and there is rain pouring happily down outside.
By erin, ago

someday i will tell the tale of why her name is bucket*

A few days ago I got some firmware upgrade for our Airport/TimeCapsule and my internet went from happy to grumpy and slow. Just figured out how to downgrade the firmware and my internet is back to happy. Still not sure exactly what went wrong, mostly just glad to have pages loading at something other than a glacial pace.

Took pictures of kittens in the sunshine.

That’s Bucket, being extra special dramatic. There’s a less dramatic one of her and a couple of Tessa up on Flickr.

Mostly spending today drinking tea and knitting, gearing up for the epicness that is the South Boston St. Patrick’s Day parade tomorrow.

Really this entire post is just an excuse to post dramatic lighting Bucket.

*Today is not that day.

By erin, ago

editing again

We had a very productive weekend. In between movie going and cleaning and making fried rice the boy and I sat down and figured out how to address all the problems in the novel. I now have a list of additions and edits to make and I’m very very happy about it.

It’s a substantial amount of work but most of it is rewriting and I don’t expect to add much more than 5k or so to the total wordcount. 10k is absolute tops, since I want to keep the whole thing under 100k. Some changes are ideas I’m vaguely annoyed at myself for not coming up with earlier, others are bits to add clarification of character or theme or whatnots.

I feel like I have direction with it again, and that makes me happy. I was feeling pretty stagnant and depressed about it for all of January, so this is a welcome change.

Today I am henna-ing my hair and rereading the current version of the manuscript so I can jot down additional notes. Tomorrow I’ll start on actual editing.

And hopefully Tessa will have found a new napping spot by then.

I did make her move after she started closing my tabs and muting my iTunes with her paws, though my typing didn’t seem to bother her. Such a helpful kitten she is.

By erin, ago