moving through
May. 29th, 2008 08:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aithneEditing proceeds apace. I continue to be astonished by my writing tics (apparently I am in love with the word apparently, argh) and I'm discovering that it's really hard to cut 20k words out of a 120k word book. The biggest places I'm able to cut are places where I condense conversations down into something a little zippier. Then I fret because oh gods I just eviscerated that conversation, am I sure I didn't take anything out that I'll need later?
I tell myself I have a copy of the previous draft and I can put it back if necessary, and move on.
Life continues to move forward; work is busy, home is busy, I'm traveling again in June, I'm still trying to find time to run and write. The dogs are doing exceedingly well in the class we're in currently; we're transitioning to controlled walking off-leash, and we're learning some new fun stuff.
Sometimes, we stumble across amusing things with the dogs. For instance, one of the commands we're teaching is "drop". Basically, what this means is that no matter what the dog is doing, he goes to his belly right in place.
One of the things you do is toss a cookie out, send the dog after it (Boone is so cute, he actually looks at me and waits for permission to go get the cookie; I guess the early training of "if I drop something you are not allowed to touch it until I say so" stuck) and then drop the dog when they grab the cookie.
Unfortunately, one of the commands we've taught the dogs is "drop it". So when I was first working on this with Boone, I would send him out, wait till he got the cookie, and then say "drop"...whereupon he would look at me and spit out the cookie.
Oops.
"Drop it" we're remapping as "mine" (as in "give me that, it's mine"). Boone has turned out to be pretty good at drops; we're going to start working on distance this week. In the end, I should be able to call him to me, call "drop" when he's halfway there, and have him immediately plunk himself down and not move until I get to him.
Now, if only I could convince him that he is not meant to be a guard dog, and that strangers aren't automatically evil, we'd be golden. Heh.
I tell myself I have a copy of the previous draft and I can put it back if necessary, and move on.
Life continues to move forward; work is busy, home is busy, I'm traveling again in June, I'm still trying to find time to run and write. The dogs are doing exceedingly well in the class we're in currently; we're transitioning to controlled walking off-leash, and we're learning some new fun stuff.
Sometimes, we stumble across amusing things with the dogs. For instance, one of the commands we're teaching is "drop". Basically, what this means is that no matter what the dog is doing, he goes to his belly right in place.
One of the things you do is toss a cookie out, send the dog after it (Boone is so cute, he actually looks at me and waits for permission to go get the cookie; I guess the early training of "if I drop something you are not allowed to touch it until I say so" stuck) and then drop the dog when they grab the cookie.
Unfortunately, one of the commands we've taught the dogs is "drop it". So when I was first working on this with Boone, I would send him out, wait till he got the cookie, and then say "drop"...whereupon he would look at me and spit out the cookie.
Oops.
"Drop it" we're remapping as "mine" (as in "give me that, it's mine"). Boone has turned out to be pretty good at drops; we're going to start working on distance this week. In the end, I should be able to call him to me, call "drop" when he's halfway there, and have him immediately plunk himself down and not move until I get to him.
Now, if only I could convince him that he is not meant to be a guard dog, and that strangers aren't automatically evil, we'd be golden. Heh.
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no subject
Date: 2008-05-29 03:58 pm (UTC)Yeah, that's pretty much how I spent the last week. I have the sad feeling that there are now some orphans that I didn't catch (references to things I cut), but all the words look the same to me at the moment, so they're just gonna have to suffer for a while.
no subject
Date: 2008-05-29 04:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-05-29 06:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-05-29 06:08 pm (UTC)