Dried chickpeas that have been soaked on one's kitchen counter and mixed with a simple solution of salt, flour and baking soda (or was it powder? I think soda) taste scrumptiously like fresh peas, much unlike their sawdusty canned counterparts.

It is actually not THAT terrifying to engage people at the grocery store/in art class/at Starbucks. It is actually fun and often thrilling, and you make all these little intimate connections throughout the day.

Adding "have a good day" to one's customary "thank you" as one steps off the bus is also fun, even if one sounds a little out of breath because one is preparing to leap out the door and onto the curb.

A well-used planner doth make one's life less complicated. Make that waaaaaaaaaay less complicated.

The Internet is home to some amazing, wonderful projects. Case in point: Dictionary of Victorian London, a collection of hundreds (thousands?) of quotes from primary source documents about pretty much anything a writer/history buff could think of.

42 days, 14 hours, 59 minutes until Christmas Day.

I had hoped to get a schwack of writing done yesterday but I was totally wiped out, and when I did sit down to get some words down on the page, I remembered a MAJOR research-plot snarl that had to be worked out ASAP. In working out this alternate history, you see, I had pinpointed the spot where English history diverges, but I had failed to work out the spot where Scotland's history diverges as well, in spite of the fact that it plays a big role in the backstory and also in the present!! The more I researched last night, the more frustrated I got - I couldn't find a place where I could reasonably make history diverge without spending weeks establishing the "real" history first in my mind and then further weeks coming up with the alternate history.

Finally, I decided to see if I would fare any better with Ireland, and after a bit of searching came up with a rather fortuitous spot that's at the EXACT same point (coincidence? fate?) where my AU-England history splits off. I'm not 100 percent sure yet that it will work, but I think it will, and now I can stop pulling a Dobby and banging my head on my desk and get back to work, which brings me to one more point: prioritising.

Karen Mahoney's recent post about putting writing first was eyeopening for me, one of those cases where I've heard the content before but never in a way that clicks quite as well, that thrills me to bits and inspires me to say, "Yes, YES! That's what I'll do." Not only am I bumping writing up the priority list (I'll go into more details later, for those who are interested in other people's writing processes) but I'm getting more organized in other areas of my life as well, and I think they will feed each other (but mainly, I think, the organization will fuel the writing).

Have you read Karen's post? Well, what are you waiting for? :-)

ETA: Whoops - forgot to say that I broke the 4,000 word mark last night ... with 300 words' worth of stubs! i.e. A says something snotty to C; G snaps at A to cut it out; BLAH BLAH BLAH; they arrive at Stonehenge. Writing out a scene this way within the draft itself has helped me before when I feel stalled, because I then go on to take each stub individually and flesh it out into prose. (And if I'm really stuck, I just leave the stub and move onto the next one. I can tackle it in the next draft!) Anyways, that's my writing goal for today - flesh out those stubby-bits!

This NaNoResFo I've embarked on has a dual purpose:

a) research the era
b) comb through the plot-and-world-building snarls

I'm feeling much more confident about (a), or at least I'm getting to the point where I feel like I'd be comfortable starting to actually write and do research as I go, but (b) is still rather tricky. The biggest snarl I've been gnawing at [eww!] is how exactly the MCs' elemental power works, which I really need to know to be able to figure out how they can learn to utilize it. The characters, obviously, won't and can't know everything I need to know, but I still have to figure it out.

My main character has an affinity with fire, so I finally decided that maybe I should go right to the source: physics. I found a couple of basic explanations of heat and temperature at Encarta and this page, and decided to delve more into the concept of kinetic energy.

Well, yanno, once I get that far, I have to run the whole gamut. I've spent the last hour or so watching videos on YouTube from an old science show called Eureka! [this one on kinetic energy is my fave so far] and they ROCK! My mind is buzzing with pieces of the puzzle wanting to click into place, but it's one of those cases where my mind will blow up if I try and type as fast as I'm thinking, so I'm going to sit down with a legal pad and piece together what I know so far.

During the course of this NaNoResFo, I also get to figure out more superficial-but-fun things, like what kind of car Gina has (I settled on this one). This might be superfluous to some people but, for someone who really needs visuals to encourage her to be visual in a story, it was a definite accomplishment!

Final note, and then I'll pick up that legal pad, I swear! The actress in the icon for this post (Eve Myles, better known as Gwen Cooper to those who watch Torchwood - which I have yet to - and Gwyneth in one memorable episode in the first season of Doctor Who - which I adore) is my current casting choice for Gina, the MC. I think she'll be sticking around for a while ...

As per an excellent suggestion by 2skippingstones, today marks the beginning of my own personal NaNoResMo (National Novel Research Month). I'm going to slice it in half, though, and make it two weeks. No fancy name for that, so I'll just refer to it as NaNoResMo. ^_^

The idea of NaNoResMo is to spend a relatively short period of time doing concentrated bouts of research for a project - in this case, a historical fantasy set in an alternate version of nineteenth century England. I've already watched various period films, so this time will be spent more with reference books and novels, books like The Last Days of Newgate [mysteries are apparently brilliant for absorbing atmospheric details] and The Jane Austen Handbook.

As of right now, this NaNoResMo is set to finish on September 4th. If anyone is interested in doing something similar, I'd love to hear how it goes!

ETA: NaNoResMo has been rechristened NaNoResFo (fortnight! how cool is that?)