Fall Hunter Moon
Superior Wolf has reached a rough half way point. Maybe. I’ve written about 45,000 words toward a goal of 90,000. I say maybe because my ambitious goal for it may require a longer novel, perhaps as much as 150,000 words. Not sure yet, not sure right now how I’ll know if I need to go longer. My goal is to write a novel of a sort I admire, long and bending of genre, deeply researched, typified by two books: Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke and The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova. Superior Wolf feels like my best effort toward this goal of anything I’ve written.
750 words a day seems like a sweet spot for me. Sometimes it takes 30 minutes. Other days four or five hours. But writing 750 words every day produces a steady accumulation of text, enough to make it seem both adequate and effective. Self reinforcing.
Working on homeowners insurance right now, a fraught topic in the red zone. The red zone, which I have mentioned before, is the area in Colorado most likely to experience wildfire. Jefferson County, our home county is the long, narrow county which abuts the southwest side of the Denver metro (gray blob, high center right). We are smack in the middle of Jeffco’s redzone.
There are many things to consider, but the most important is the replacement value of the home. Since replacement for a structure will be undertaken in a contemporary environment (at the time of the fire), the home’s initial construction value is irrelevant. What matters is what it will take to rebuild an equivalent structure when a fire occurs. This is, of course, affected by any upgrades. We’ve added solar panels, refreshed the kitchen and redone the downstairs bathroom. You don’t want to pay for too much replacement value, but you for sure don’t want to have too little. A tough balance to strike.
Also called the guy who installed our boiler for an inspection before winter gets ornery.
Final activity for yesterday was changing the oil in the snowblower. If you have any mechanical aptitude, this is probably not worth mentioning. In my case the material world and I struggle every time we come in contact. I did get the job done, but it took much more thinking and jiggering than it might have. Example: to drain the oil the snowblower has to be tipped over on its side, but not fall over. That meant balancing the snowblowers unwieldy bulk with my legs while my arms prevented it from tipping over all the way. The result was dependence on my knees for backward stability. And that left one isn’t working so well right now. Gave me a couple of interesting moments.
A sort of gett’er done day.
Yesterday included three separate trips into Evergreen. First, I took Kate in for the morning Rosh Hashanah service at Beth Evergreen. Then, I came back to answer questions, be available for the electrician and the painter. At noon I went back to pick up Kate and eat the after service lunch with her. All these trips included waits in two spots on Brook Forest Road for culvert repair. Stop. Slow. Stop. Slow.
There were kugels in aluminum pans, bagels with lox and cream cheese or chopped egg, fresh cut vegetables, fruit. Paper plates and plastic forks. Lots of eating and greeting. Some very short skirts. Some men carried small cloth pouches containing prayer shawls and yarmulkes. Kids ran around,
Went to my first meeting with the Evergreen Writer’s Group last night. Formed in August of this year this group meets in a used book store, Where The Books Go, in Evergreen. There were four of us last night. I sat and listened since I had not understood the mss submission process. Just mechanics.
Kate had Bailey Patchworkers for most of the day and I spent the day up in the loft with the dogs, so the jackhammering didn’t bother us. This will be worth it, but remodeling is never easy since by definition it has to take place where you live.
