'tis the season

The good folk who supported Proposition 8 in California are taking this time of peace on earth and good will toward all to continue their work of destruction and hatred. Not content with forbidding any more marriages between same-sex couples in their state, they are now suing to nullify those legally performed and executed marriages which were in place before Proposition 8 was passed. You all saw this, right? If you haven't, go on and read it; I'll be here when you get back.

The slim light in this miasma of wrongheadedness is the California Attorney General, who is calling on the court to invalidate Proposition 8 on the grounds that a constitutional amendment cannot be used to retroactively strip rights from a group of people. If any of you reading this live in California, please stir yourselves at this busy time to do what you can to support Attorney General Brown. I know, you've got plans, time set aside to spend with your family. Think of it as a gift to someone else, so that they can remain a family.

For those who failed of seeing Mr. Olbermann's November 10 commentary on Proposition 8, I offer it to you, below. Thanks to maryrobinette for bringing to to my attention.

In which writing is a science

Ahem.

Fledgling the Final Draft stands at 99,323 solid words. Professor Dochayn tried to change gender on me part-way through the narrative, but I was too wily for her/him. And! Looking up from 'way down here inside the sentences, I discover that I need to hit two more plot points -- which is to say, figure out how they resolve -- and I'm home. The last bit can more-or-less stand as written, so we're likely looking closer to 110,000 for a finished manuscript than 120,000. Suddenly, this is doable.

It's possible that I need to go back 'mong the solid words and plant one more hook, thereby revealing the phrase "solid words" for the sham it is. I've printed out the Book As It Stands and will do a fast-read tomorrow, just to be sure that the story is, yanno, written in English, and fails of being entirely opaque.

As it happens, tomorrow may be a good reading day, for we are expecting, first, snow, and, after that, snow. The weatherbeans predict 10 to 18 inches on the ground by the time the skies clear early Monday afternoon. In anticipation of down wires, The Leewit is even now taking on electrons.

In other news, we've made reservations for dinner at the Lucky Panda on Christmas the Day; having decided that life is complex enough without adding Feast Preparation into the mix. It will in any case be a Working Yule; I have the week between Christmas and New Year's off from the day job, eleven glorious days in a row! Maybe I'll be able to read a book that's not mine, or at least finish the book I've been reading for two months. The first disk of The Last Airbender arrived from Netflix; maybe we'll have time to view it.

Oh, and the page proofs for Longeye are in-house, with a please-return-by date of January 2. Steve will be taking the lead on that project.

...and then, of course, there's the Saltation rewrite on the horizon.