Dinner and more

So as I said at the start of the blog, my girlfriend was recently diagnosed with celiac. We’ve been on a gluten free diet the entire month thus far (well, I’ll be honest, since *I* don’t have celiac I’ve strayed from it a few times, but a surprisingly small number of cheat meals have been taken).

Today for lunch she made (another) awesome chicken and bean soup (that we used, with a little more cooking down, as a sauce over some quinoa pasta this evening), pictured here. So much flavor! If these are the kind of meals I’m going to get, I think  I can deal with being gluten free. Even though I don’t have any gluten sensitivity as far as I’m aware, having been on the paleo diet before I’m keenly aware of the fact that gluten heavy foods tend to be great for keeping/putting on weight. So I’m looking forward to getting a little weight loss out of the whole thing, at the very least.

Last night I made the decision to quasi-junk my sci-fi manuscript. I’m keeping all my planning and simply starting anew. I’ve learned a lot about the characters through the first ~25,000 or so words and reading back through the first several chapters it just didn’t work with the later ones. So I decided to go back and make use of my more developed understanding of my characters to start again from the beginning.

I think it’s been a smart choice. The writing is coming more easily and I’m doing a far better job pacing the story so far. Let’s just say my setting descriptions were sparse-to-nonexistent in the earliest chapters of the first draft. Juggling story and description has always been my biggest challenge, I either end up with way too much description and no story, or a ton of story happening very rapidly against what might as well be a white backdrop. First draft 2.0 (I refuse to call it a second draft, since I didn’t complete the other one) is striking a much better balance, and I’m over 7,000 words into it on only the second day, so the writing seems to be coming with more ease as well.

I’ve finally decided to make use of my twitter account, as well. I don’t know how often I’ll update it or what I’ll use it for mainly right now, but I will be using it (unlike my old twitter account, which has been sitting untouched for well over a year. Perhaps longer.). So if you have any interest in my singular tweet so far, head on over and check it out at http://twitter.com/jsjoyn.

I think that’s the long and short of it for this evening. Back to writing! My goal is to get through chapter four tonight (chapters 1 and 2 came yesterday, managed to pound out 3 this morning).