Multiple Earworms Singing Counterpoint
Sat 2005-11-05 23:59:46 (in context)
- 6,015 words (if poetry, lines) long
Short entry tonight. Very tired. Very happy. Just got back from a party. Those things that go on at cons. As parties go, this one rocked, like, literally. This was the annual WFC Folk Singing Do-hickey as MCd and performed by Patrick and Teresa Neilsen Hayden, Charles de Lint, and quite possibly others. I don't know who officially organizes this thing. I'm not sure it's exactly official. This year they'd taken over the Assembly room (the Madison Concourse labels its first floor meeting areas after ceremonial bits of the Capitol) by ten o'clock. I got back to my room at one thirty. There may have been other goings-on after Alma and Deck and I left, I don't know.
The upshot is, I've got multiple earworms playing simultaneously on the various tracks of my mental recording studio. "Angel Band" as performed by Teresa Neilsen Hayden and by Nina Kiriki Hoffman; "Free Man In Paris" ("the freelance editor's lament," I think someone called it) as performed by Patrick Neilsen Hayden; "Jersey Devil" as performed by Charles de Lint; and that's not to mention the annual comic dirging of "Teen Angel" or the various SF filks written and performed by Joe Haldeman or the very first audio-visual performance of Charles de Lint's "Cherokee Girl" (now with 100% more belly dancing). And more. Oh my Goodness yes. I'm going to be humming "Ain't Misbehaving" all the way to sleep, unless it morphs into "You Took Advantage Of Me." Or "Java Jive." "Java Jive" was not in fact performed, but it shares a chord progression with the other two.
The NaNo novel progressed today, but not by much. And you might call it cheating, as it was a copy-paste job. But! It was not a mere copy-paste job. It had Justification. You see, there's this, ahem, sex scene in Gwen's manuscript, which Gwen reviews. It reads very strangely now that all clauses pertaining to Brooke are gone. However, in a much later chapter, that scene is enacted with all its sentences intact as Brooke, regardless of being stranded in (for want of a better term) Real Life, follows the plot Gwen wrote. So I had to write the scene once in fragments in Chapter Two so Gwen could read it, then copy-paste it to Chapter Ten and write all the missing bits--swapping out the name of Brooke's original partner for that of the person with whom Brooke finds herself in (so-called) Real Life.
That sounded really twisted and kinky and grammatically confused. But it's meant to cause this really neat deja vu effect as the sentence fragments from Chapter Two resonate in your memory as you read Chapter Ten. Plus, it's a really hot scene.
This all presuming I get this right, of course.
Tomorrow: The awards banquet! The dead dog party! The Saints play the Bears! Onnnnnn Sunday! Sunday! Sunday!
PS. This, apparently, is what I mean by a "short entry."