The Pendulum Swings
When did people start defining themselves in association with what they hate instead of what they love? Are we seeing a resurgence of Jacobin politics beginning to rear its bloody head?
The Book
Back in the saddle again, for about two weeks now and it has been glorious. I get up, hoover up my breakfast, gulp down a cup of delicious coffee my husband made for me and get to work. I check the news while I eat, and then pretty much stay off the Internet until I have dinner, read a few articles and get back to work again.
Third draft editing has been incredibly fun, I am able to find other bits of a topic that I’d put somewhere else and move it to a better location, only because now I know where everything is. One of the main themes that continuously runs through my book is SCIENCE (I love science).
For the third draft, I decided to rewrite each page from Scrivner onto a Word document. It forces you to read every single word because you have to type it all out again, and so far it has worked beautifully. Also, I can get a better word count as I go along and I don’t entirely trust Scrivner to keep everything backed up.
I am always worried I will open Scrivner and it either won’t open or it does open and it is nothing but blank pages. Right now, I have my second draft and all my research backed up on 2 thumb drives and one large external hard drive. There is no way I am going to let 15-plus years of research and 6 plus years of writing just disappear into the ether.
I am happy to see Merve again, and there were a lot of new Study With Me people on YouTube, so that has been fun checking out the new videos to keep me company while I work on the book.
Abao in Tokyo is one of my favorites, this video is just 4 hours of his hands and a window that looks out on a rainy street in Tokyo. Abao in Tokyo
Eucalyptus VLOG has a lot of nice videos, this one is just her hands and is not very distracting. Eucalyptus VLOG
This video has a wonderful, stark brutalist feeling to it, the window, the cups, the buildings and that sky. babomoments
I like the Study with Me videos that show just the hands best, sometimes whole bodies but only side views or from the back. Full frontal face is a major distraction. If there is too much going on, a big timer clock and messages running on the side in the video are way to distracting. I saw one with hands that had enormous fingernails and I couldn’t watch, I had too many questions.
The videos help considerably, it keeps me company and I like knowing someone else is working with me. I can easily go for 10 hours with only a few breaks. Before I discovered these videos, I would find myself wasting way too much time cruising the Internet and feeling like I wasn’t accomplishing anything.
Because I am working on a section about the French Revolution, I am currently into French pop songs.
Music: Longtemps by Tarmac