Gary managed to put his new wheel barrow together without any help from me.

There should be a photo here showing the huge amount of trash we licked up yesterday—not to mention this morning. However, I put my camera down someplace and Gary had to find it for me. Check below for the flotsam photo. It’s impressive.

Camp NaNoWriMo word count: 25,405 as of 10:20am on Thursday, 18 April 2019

EMD word count at 75,543—revision to page 165. I might finish Part 2 today, and then I will do something else (see below). The word count for the novel dips and then rises as I revise and  shrinks and rises while fiddle as I read it through again. Chapter 8 seemed a little too long at about 5300 words, and then it was a few hundred words longer, and now it’s back up to 5327. 

I am late this morning for no particular reason except that I did not begin writing so early—just a few minutes ago, in fact. Our contractor is here and later this morning or afternoon I will paint the ceiling and at least one was and put a coat of Kilz on the fridge and maybe call it good. 

I’m just going to say that I would not hire me to paint a door, as I am an imperfect amateur. I am painting because a professional job would have cost more than a couple hundred dollars. This is one of those cases where no, my time is not worth more than that. It takes no more than an hour for each coat, three coats outside and frame, then two

The floats are a gift, but the bulging plastic bag is stuffed with trash.

so far on the inside plus frame. The inside face, which I painted yesterday, was harder than the outside. I felt pretty confident about getting a smooth coat on the outside, where the primed finish had just enough tooth to grab paint. The inside was absolutely smooth and the paint wanted to slide into grooves and off ridges. And there are drips on the top inside of the door. Drips. The door will survive its imperfections and so will I. 

I have pocketed Ada Limón’s “Instructions on Not Giving Up.” The poem are my novel’s epigraph. 

I am loving Dreyer’s English, though his explanation for why two spaces after a period existed and why there is only one space after a period now is pretty much as ridiculous as every other explanation I have read. Variable width fonts are not an invention of the computer age; they existed long before typewriters. The double space is a casualty of an easy computer editing strategy, where, as he points out, a find/change can remove all random/accidental double spaces in a moment. (Unless you want to keep the ones setting off sentences, in which case they had to be looked and and kept or lost one at a time.) There is a significant exception. APA form requires two spaces, last time I checked. 

And while I am about it: I am a serial/Oxford comma person. All the way. The only time I prepared to fight with an editor (bless them, seriously) was in a journal that wanted to kill my Oxford comma. Not a chance. 

We are a third through The Far Side of the World, book 10, and I am several inches into the second half of the baby blanket. The blanket is looking pretty after all.