notes and resources

Ended up taking a day off yesterday. Tom and I worked on some house projects early in the day, then went out to dinner with his mom, at which point we decided to pick up some beer on the way home and go watch a movie.

"Some beer and a movie" wound up being a fair amount of beer, and a movie and a half. By the time Tom and I hauled our tv upstairs (we have a bigger tv, but she has furniture on which to sit), and the xbox, and then brought the xbox back down and brought up the blu-ray player instead, watched V for Vendetta with about three getting water/smoking cigarette breaks, and gotten partly through The Matrix... yeah it was after midnight. Tom's usually out by like 9.30, and though I'm often not asleep until midnight, I've dulled down to semi-conscious by 10.30 or 11. Movies always make me extra-sleepy, and so does drinking, so I was freaking done.

Turns out I had about a 900-word buffer built up, from writing a little extra each day so far, which helped me out today - though I kept going until I was 400 over where I needed to be today, just to help recreate that buffer again. (Thanksgiving always eats a day or two out of my NaNo'ing.) But Tom declared today was an Official Day Off - we'd do grocery shopping, but that was it, we both needed a real day free of errands chores work etc. So, I wrote outside a little while, then came in and wrote some more. Did the shopping, Tom made dinner, we ate dinner while watching another episode of Star Trek, Tom went into gaming-mode and I resumed writing.

I did let myself stop for some research, in case you hadn't noticed from the copious amounts of plagiarism from antique ads. The corset ones, I based on my vague memories of ones I've looked at in the past. The rest, I lifted straight from vintage sources. Initially, I googled "1890 newspaper", then "1890 newspaper ads" - and, people, there are image search results for those. Internet, I love you so. But I wasn't finding a good sampling gathered together anywhere... then, on one of my 43290 random walks away from writing to get water/use bathroom/eat a cookie/see wtf a cat is meowing about, I remembered something. I HAVE PAPERS FROM THE 1890s. And I knew where they were, which is the real miracle.

At some point, when nosing around my favorite little antique store back in Fredonia, I'd picked up a magazine-type thing with fiction and sheet music ("Ev'ry Month"), and "The Youth's Companion", running a special issue on the World's Fair. One is 1898, the other, 1893. PERFECT. Both have ads! Not quite the variety you'd get in a newspaper, but enough for my purposes.

I decided I still wanted to reference a newspaper story about a fire written around the same time period, just to get an idea of the language. Two seconds of googling led me to GenDisasters, which is AWESOME. I read a handful of stories about fires around 1900 in North Carolina, focusing on a few about house fires.

Clearly, I have read waaaay too many things written in/set in the years around 1900, because writing in that language comes absurdly easy to me. The only thing I had to go back and work on, was adding that personal sort of flavor to it, the color commentary, I suppose. My natural instinct was to write it far more coldly and "professionally". ;p

I should probably also note, all the crap about fixing a corrupted jpg is, as far as I can gather, legit. I made extensive use of this forum thread, which is a couple years old but still worked for what I needed. I wanted something more complicated than just opening it in different software (which, in all honesty, DOES actually work sometimes), and the header-info being screwy was perfect. Plus, the fix was sufficiently scary, but manageable with such good instructions.

I've consulted with Tom (my resident expert on time travel/alternate dimension/crazy physics in general), and we figure she and anything physically connected to her could be unharmed. But I feel like something as sensitive as a digital thing would suffer some kind of quirk from being hauled through time. (Also - she did fall two stories down.) Tom has also suggested that she should get cancer as a result of the time travel, but that's just because he's mean. She may actually eventually get some kind of side-effect, but I don't know what yet. sigh.