Super Indy! 2012

As any football fan knows, Indianapolis is host to this year’s Super Bowl. Steve and I went downtown yesterday and again today to take a look at all the festivities. There’s still some work in progress, but downtown is looking fantastic. I have photos posted on Google+:

Saturday Part 1: The walk down to Monument Circle to see the XLVI and the race cars with the team logos. Glad we did this Saturday, because Sunday it was just a solid mass of people. Continued on through Circle Center Mall (with a stop at the Colts pro shop) and into Super Bowl Village.

Saturday Part 2: Visited the NFL Experience, which in my opinion wasn’t worth it unless you have kids under 12, or you really want to wait in a long line to have your picture taken with this year’s Lombardi Trophy. Pictures of it all was enough for me.

Sunday: A repeat of Saturday minus NFL Experience. Managed to get some different views, and made it to Lucas Oil Stadium. Sadly, the tours were sold out. Walked back up through Monument Circle again.

We have been blessed with excellent weather. Mid-30s and no snow on the ground is unheard of in February. We’ll take it. This week starts the craziness, and I will watch it from the comfort of my suburban living room.

Another revision finished.

Finished with the revision of Of Love and Coffee. I’m thinking that I’m going to send this one to Lulu.com, get one or two printed, and give them out at the Starbucks where I wrote the rough draft. Only a few of the people who worked there when I wrote it are still there, but they might get a chuckle out of it. If nothing else, they might tell me where I erred. LOL.

This was a fun book to write, and it’s a pretty good book all in all. That still surprises me. The revision comes in at just shy of 50k words (I cut 1k words… Hope I can cut a similar proportion of words in the next revision of Mancunian Waltz…) I don’t think a 50k word romance is marketable, but I don’t know. Don’t know if I care.

So, now another break and then it’s on to Friends and Lovers. 

Revising “Of Love and Coffee”

Maybe it makes some sense that the simplest and quickest novel I’ve ever written (50,300 words in 9 days) is also the easiest and quickest revision I’ve ever done. And maybe it doesn’t. How is this possible?

While I was writing Of Love and Coffee, there were moments when I hated it. (See here.) On re-reading, I do not know what I hated! This has got to be the tightest rough draft I have ever written, which is mind boggling. When I sat down to write it on Nov 21, with ten days left of NaNoWriMo, I had no idea what I was going to write. All I had was 1) it’s a romance, so there’s a couple that ends up together in the end, and 2) it takes place in Starbucks. That’s it! How did I do this? How do I do it again?

There is some really, really good stuff in this book. I’m a little stunned that I wrote it. I’ve read through the whole thing once and there are a few things that need work, a few instances where I changed my mind about something midway through so now have to go back and edit those changes into the earlier story. I mixed up names (Melanie? Melinda?), spellings of names, and there are lots of grammar and spelling errors. But other than that, the revisions are light. Nothing compared to what I just went through with Mancunian Waltz. I should have this finished in the next week or so, long before my end of winter deadline. Wow…

Back to work

I took a break from everything for the last couple of weeks. Didn’t touch the instrument (violin) until the last couple of days, let myself rest after the mad rush to get the revision of Mancunian Waltz finished. (It was only a mad rush because I wanted to keep the momentum going. I feared that once I let it slacken, I’d stall again.) It felt good to take some time off.

Play Ethic rehearsals begin again this week. Today, in fact. Our new program is Scandinavian music, and the performance is on March 3rd at a new venue for us. We are playing:

• Grieg, 2 Nordic Melodies, op.63
• Nielsen, Little Suite, op.1
• Sibelius, Kuolema: Canzonetta, op.62a
• Svendsen, 2 Icelandic Melodies
• Svendsen, I fjol gjaett’e gjeitinn (variations on a Norwegian folksong), op.31 (I can’t find a YouTube for this one.)

I’ve also been feeling the itch to write again, and since I really wasn’t wanting to dive right back into a massive project again (like Friends and Lovers, my 2009 NaNo novel that needs a complete rewrite, much like Mancunian Waltz did), I decided to work on a revision of my second 2010 novel, Of Love and Coffee. That was my 50k word novel that I wrote in nine days, that I thought I hated, but on re-reading I think it’s not so bad. I have it on my Kindle (I bought myself a new graphite Kindle Keyboard) and am going through and making notes. I’m resisting the temptation to expand and throw more into the story. I want to keep it short and simple, mostly just to prove that I can. So I hope to have it finished by the end of March. And then I’ll delve into the rewrite of Friends and Lovers and hope to have that finished by the end of the summer. Then I can come up with something new for November this year! I really hate that I have nothing new to add to my W.I.P. list after last November. I don’t want to do that again!

Revision is finished!

Whew! Now for a break, and then onto something else. This one needs to rest before I try another read-through. Ah, it feels good. Finally, three years later, I gave them a real story.