But from time to time, I do like to talk about stuff. And I thought I might take a leaf out of my friend Corrina Lawson’s book, and write about stuff other than writing. Posts are likely to be short; I’m probably going to post using my smartphone (an LG Ally, more on that later), which doesn’t allow for…verbosity. But still, I’ll talk about what’s on my mind, and if it’s interesting to other people, they’ll listen.

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Generally speaking, the Ally hasn’t been getting glowing reviews. There’s something faintly dismissive in a lot of what I’ve read, as if it’s a good device for middle-aged people who want to think they’re cool, without actually knowing what cool is.

Maybe I’m one of those people. Or maybe I’m someone who wanted things an Android phone could provide, who didn’t want to spend $200 on a new phone. The reality is, the older I get, the cheaper I get. I look at things and think, “Do I really want to spend the money?” I’m sure the Incredible is a very cool phone. I’m just not sure that, for me, the extra cool is worth all the things I’d have to give up–like books–in order to have it.

So far I adore my Ally. I make use of down-time on the bus to check gmail and Twitter, so I’m all caught up by the time I get home. That leaves me time to write at night, and gets me to bed earlier than before. Yeah, reviewers aren’t loving the phone. So what? The thing about any review is that the reviewer approaches the thing to be reviewed with a series of biases and expectations, and those color the reviewer’s opinion. If you’re playing with all the technology, you might find the Ally kind of blah. But if you’re going from an ordinary phone to a smartphone, you need to think about what your needs, biases and expectations are.

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And that’s it for tonight.

Yet I keep buying new books, because I see a review, or I hear buzz. I want to know more, so I hunt for the author’s website, and I hope there’ll be an excerpt there, one that’ll tell me this is a book I want to read, this is a book I’ll love reading. I make a note of it in the book I keep in my purse, and I plan to head for the bookstore.

I could do all that if I went to the bookstore and found the book and opened it, sure. But I rarely go to the bookstore just to browse any more. I go with a mission, with something in mind. Half the time, I’m there as a detour between Point A and Point B, and I don’t have time to wander. So I don’t browse, and I don’t go looking for that book that sounded good in that review I read last week.

In the interests of candor, sometimes an excerpt will make me decide a book isn’t for me, after all. I don’t think that matters, in the end. The author isn’t losing a sale she would have otherwise had. If the excerpt doesn’t work for me, the same text, read in a bookstore, isn’t going to work for me either. However I make the decision, it’s the same decision: I’m not buying the book.

Given all that, given that I’m writing for readers like me, you can be sure I will be putting up an excerpt as soon as there’s a good reason for it.

I’ve also been baking — the madness continues. I’ve made brownies and pancakes from scratch, (in the usually-make-it-from-mix category), and I’ve made lemon-cornmeal cookies and cornbread (in the revisiting-old-favorites category), and I’ve made orange-cranberry scones in (the baking-something-for-the-first-time category). So far, nothing’s been bad, and I’ve had friends willing and able to help me eat everything.

Of course I’ve been reading, too. Asking if I read is like asking if I breathe. I’ll try to post my thoughts on what I’ve read this weekend.

I spent the last week or so writing a couple of scenes. The second one got harder and harder to write as time went on, and I realized my problem was that the scene was boring. I went back to the preceding scene, to figure out what to follow it with, and realized that it didn’t work either, though in this case the problem was with story logistics.

So today I have to cut both scenes, and then I have to figure out what happens instead. 4k words, gone just like that.

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Last night my sister and I watched the 2nd and 3rd episodes of Caprica. So far, so good. As far as I can tell, a lot of stuff is being set into motion, and I’m starting to be very curious to see how it all plays out. And not even interested to see how it plays out in a way that leads to the world of Battlestar Galactica–just interested to see how it plays out on its own terms. That being said, there is something connecting both series that I’m curious about. In BSG, Joseph Adama, Bill’s father, is known as a great jurist. (Or at least that’s my recollection.) In Caprica, he’s Joe Adama and he’s a corrupt mob lawyer. I want to know how one man becomes the other. I hope I’ll see it.

Whatever happens, the ads for this week’s episode make me want to see it now. My sister and I talked about watching two episodes every other week; I’m not sure I can wait that long.

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After finishing Deborah Crombie’s Necessary As Blood a couple of weeks ago, I was absolutely compelled to start the series at the beginning again. I flew through the first seven books–A Share in Death; All Shall Be Well; Leave the Grave Green; Mourn Not Your Dead; Dreaming of the Bones; Kissed a Sad Goodbye; and A Finer End–but now I’m slowing down. I think it’s partly because I remember the more recent books more clearly than the older ones; I’m having a “Oh, yeah, this one…” reaction.

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I’ve also been writing: scribbling the first draft of the mess-in-progress, and averaging over 500 words a day, which is a smoking pace for me; and writing posts for The Moody Muses.

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I’m unlikely to watch the Super Bowl tonight–it’s not how I want to spend that time–but I hope the New Orleans Saints win. They’re underdogs and that city has been through enough. It’s not even that I don’t want the Colts to lose. It’s really all about the Saints.

Realizing that tonight made me realize that I love the same thing in my two guilty-pleasure TV shows, NCIS and Bones, and it’s one of the many things I loved about Battlestar Galactica. I’m not sure this has any meaning for my writing, but I suspect it does. I know that I’m interested in the connections my characters have with each other. There’s a line in U2′s great song, One: “We get to carry each other.” I think that’s true; I think we carry each other through our friendships. Maybe that’s something I need to hold in mind as I keep scribbling away.

I read fiction for entertainment, relaxation, and enjoyment. If I want to work, I read the history, literary essays, biography, science, and legal books that grace my shelves.

I’ve never been able to put into words why I prefer genre fiction when reading fiction, why, if I’ll read dense histories, I won’t read dense fiction. The above explains it brilliantly.

I am a happy woman.

I think a change to my process is behind this new productivity. My working pattern has always been to polish, polish, polish, get-it-as-close-to-perfect-as-I-can before moving on. I had all kinds of reasons why this was a good thing to do (including, “I can’t help it.”) But in the last year or so I’ve been feeling…confined, somehow, as if I were somehow crushing the liveliness out of my work, control-freaking it to death. I’ve been trying to figure out how to let in some wildness, because I think I need it, and then a couple of weeks ago, it occurred to me that the polish, polish, polish thing might be a huge part of what was confining me. Because what I do when I polish, polish, polish is set the scene in stone…which then limits what can arise as a result of it. I’d been trimming possibilities out of my work as I go along.

When I realized that, I decided to to try sketching ideas for scenes, instead of writing as if this was it, the definitive version, and see where that took me. At the worst, I might not get anything out of it except the knowledge that, no, the polish-polish thing is really something I have to do. On the other hand, I might figure out a new approach.

So far it’s working, both in terms of words produced and in my feelings toward doing to the work itself. I still get anxious sometimes, refusing to open the book to start writing because I don’t know what comes next in the latest scene. When that happens, I tell myself to write down some of the stuff that’s bubbling up.

The other helpful thing I’m doing is abandoning the spreadsheet I was using to track my progress. It just disheartened me every time I cut words, driving the daily wordcount into negative numbers. Writing is hard enough without doing things that make it harder. I have counted how much I’ve written–obviously, since I can say how much I’ve done in the last 10 days–but only in a loose and informal way.

I recognize that I’m going to have a worse mess to deal with at the end than usual. Right now, I’m completely at peace with the idea, mainly, I suspect, because it’s not quite real to me. That doesn’t mean I’m not right to be okay with this. I’ll only know when I’m done.

Which will happen a whole lot sooner than I’d hoped, if my current productivity keeps up.

• Scribbling: not a lot of words generated, but they’re being generated steadily;
• Being at the Moody Muses. I post every Wednesday. Come visit all of us;
• Interesting times in my personal life. Nothing I particularly want to talk about and it’s not a catastrophe or anything, but it is a time and energy drain, so less time and energy to talk.

Good books in the last week or so: A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book (I still haven’t figured out what I think of it); and Anna Katherine’s Salt and Silver, where any number of tricky technical issues — world-building, knowing where the story really begins, tone, etc. — were all beautifully handled.

I’m not sure what I’m reading right now. That personal issue makes me prone to grazing. Ah, well…

These days I’m more of a baseball and football fan than a hockey fan, but in my early 20s, I dated a guy who started skating when he was four years old, so I learned to love the game. My father tried to teach me what icing and offsides were, but it took my boyfriend and never-ending Bruins games on TV.

When we broke up, I lost touch with the Bruins, but I still remember enough that I’m sure I’ll enjoy the game.

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Currently reading: A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book. It’s diffuse and I’m not entirely sure where it’s going, but I’m finding it compelling nontheless.