Word count, dental visits, complaints about the weather, lies, and the lying liars who tell them.

I had finished my second mile, turned south toward home, and the sun was shining, when the hail started this morning. The wind came up and reached a gale. Little pellets of ice driven into my face. It hailed off and on the rest of the way home. We were dressed for the weather—cool-not-quite-cold and wettish weather. But hail!

Gary is happy with his new coffeemaker, has offered to pose for a photo vacuuming the woodpile (I will take him up on this!), and I am only eating soft foods, such as over cooked pasta and applesauce and chèvre cheesecake.

I had a temporary crown put on last week and destroyed it within 24 hours. The dentist put a new one on and was reassuring. “It’s not your fault,” she said and told about her own and her receptionist’s adventures with temporary crowns. Nothing hurts but obviously I can’t have anything hard or stringy. Greens, even little bitty chopped greens get stuck between molars on the other side of my mouth and that is painful! I have been reduced to trying kefir for the first time when what I really want, always want, is something salty and crunchy. sigh Popcorn is surely one of the bad habits that caused the problem to begin with.

On a brighter note, I am not reading anyone else’s novel during the entire month of April in order to concentrate on serious revision of my own. I had moved chapters around, broke long sequences up, and wrote the new chapters I was so afraid of beginning. I finished that second draft a couple of days ago, reformatted the document, and printed it out to work on as draft three. After rearranging them on the floor, I moved them around some more on the computer and prepared to read chapters in backwards order. That’s what I’ve been doing. I started with chapter 17 and I’m on chapter 10 for tomorrow. [Spellchecker is still turned off. So there’s that sort of line-editing to do.] There are 82,896 words just now in this third draft, and that’s a good thing. I feel butchery coming on. I have until the end of the month to finish this third draft and I like having 80k+ words, so fingers crossed I don’t butcher too many thousands of words.

The sky has gone all over blue, which seems to be happening most days after our run, though the other day it was mostly dry and only poured rain and hail after we got home. What is the deal with all this hail?

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In my Junior English classes, I used a one-day activity in order to have a solid set of agreed-upon terms. The words varied slightly, but “fiction” and “lie” were always on the list. Fiction isn’t a lie. It’s untrue, but the writer expects readers to know this up front.

A lie is an untruth told with the intent to deceive.

If you ask me the time, I glance at my watch, misread it, and say 1:30, I’m not lying, I’m mistaken. If I laugh, wink and say it’s barely past noon in a way you know immediately is untrue, I’m probably just joking, not trying to fool anyone. But if I know you have a 2:30 appointment and know it’s already past time for your to leave, but I mean for you to miss your meeting, and I tell you it’s 1:30, I am lying. I am deliberately telling you something untrue to fool you.

Fox will be forced to pay Dominion $787.5m for false allegations that the company rigged its voting machines to swing the 2020 election. “We acknowledge the court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false,” the company said in a carefully worded statement that fell short of acknowledging Fox’s role in spreading election lies.

—The Guardian

However they parse it, Fox News absolutely knew they were lying about the 2020 election. They wanted the higher ratings they received by telling people the election was a fraud. That is a perfect example of a lie, an untruth told to deceive. The motivation was money. Une telle surprise!