Thursday, Like A Monday

It’s Thursday, but it feels like a Monday. In a good way, mind you. Because all the damn ice has melted off or washed away, which means I get to go running. Not only that, but Miss B gets to come with me, which means we’ll both work off a mountain of fidgets and irritability.

All I have to do is wait for my breakfast to settle. Then it’ll be time to tie my shoes and get the fuck outta the house. The big thing will be reminding myself to be careful and take it easy, since there may be some slippery patches–the mud is going to be incredible, if I have to veer off pavement. Sticking to a dry-ish route is going to take some ingenuity.

I couldn’t be happier. I am twitching while I type, all but desperate to get out the door and work off these nerves. It was so bad yesterday I had to consciously remind myself not to snap at anyone or anything interrupting my train of thought. Working when one is snappish can be good–the irritation can push you to better characterization and to fiercer work, not to mention attention to small details. Most of the time, though, it’s a handicap because EVERYTHING MAKES ONE WANT TO KILL. “Perpetually murderous” might be a good story, but it’s an inefficient method of goal achievement. It creates bodies and paperwork, both things that take up a great deal of working time.

I jest, but only halfway.

So, today I run all my fidgets out, and Miss B’s, too. Then it’s Afterwar, and some more Roadtrip Z, and maybe a bit on a super-sekrit project. And yes, today is the day another chapter of Roadtrip Z goes live! I am tremendously excited.

Now that my breakfast has settled a bit, it’s time to brush my teeth and tie the aforementioned shoes.

Over and out.

Cabin Fever

We’re still snowed in, so telling the story of Who Shot At Willard and the Consequences Thereof has hit an unexpected snag. Everyone is inside, safe and relatively warm. They’re saying “ice storm”, though, and those are two words I never wanted to hear again. The dogs are both snarky and twitchy because it’s been too slick to take them out, and Miss B in particular needs a job or two before she goes mad from boredom. I need to get out and run, too, before I explode with frustration. The treadmill only goes so far.

Case in point: it’s taken me about twenty minutes to write the above, between dogs demanding attention, kids wanting to talk, shivering, refilling my coffee cup, and various moments of irritation so intense I have to shut my eyes and take at least five deep breaths to stave off screaming.

We’re supposed to warm up after the ice storm, which will mean rain and flooding. At this point, I’m counting it a small price to pay for just getting back to normal.If I was a little younger I’d probably go running, even on solid ice, and count a cracked bone as just the cost of getting some of the damn prickling under my skin worked off.

So I’m going to channel some of that aggression and irritation into Afterwar, do some office cleaning, and play some Prince to encourage dancing around. One kind of effort is much the same as another, and if I keep moving, I won’t think about how furious I am at being trammeled. Solitude is as necessary as food or air, and the older I get, the more so it becomes.

Over and out.

A Certain Symmetry

I know some of you will look at this picture and go, “pfft, that’s not even two feet of snow, what’s the problem?” The problem, chickadees, is that even six inches of snow is like six feet here, because the PNW gets this kind of weather so rarely we don’t really have the infrastructure to deal with it. That means roads go unplowed more likely than not, and things like banks, schools, and city government shut down. It further means cars get abandoned by the roadside, the power goes out for many many people, and commerce grinds mostly to a halt. The last time this happened was in 2008, just to give you an idea, and wasn’t that a mess. (Hint: Yes, yes it was.)

On the bright side, there are snowball fights, and the kids are having a ball sledding down the hill. And while I’m writing a zombie apocalypse in a winter storm, there’s a certain symmetry to being housebound under a blanket of cold white.

Soon it’ll warm back up and the rain will wash everything away, which will return us to flooding and moss. So it’s not all bad, but I’m beginning to get a little itchy, wanting to get out of the house for once. Treadmill running isn’t the same, and Miss B is on the verge of bored destruction–there are only so many laps she can do of the backyard to work off her energy. Odd Trundles, being built low, brushes his chest on the snow when he goes out to attend to Nature’s call, and when he gets back inside he looks at me very much as if I have created this white wasteland just to inconvenience his tender undercarriage.

Anyway, that’s the weather where I am. Today is Thursday, and that means another chapter or two of the serial for my lovely Patreon patrons. So stay tuned, that will be up soon, and I’ll get back to telling the story of who was shooting at Willard in a bit.

Over and out.

Stability Underfoot

I just want to stay in bed reading schlock and playing AbyssRium today. Unfortunately, the flu–I’m pretty sure it was flu, I certainly ached all over for it–has abated, which means I’m back to running. One cannot do that while snuggling in bed, and Miss B, in forced leisure while I hacked, coughed, and shivered, is brimming with energy that needs to be worked off. Otherwise she will find herself Jobs Around The House, and they will likely involve Things Mum Does Not Want Done. I won’t be cross with her for them, because she is Dog and Dog Can’t Help It, but I will be rather cross with myself for being a lazy puppy mum and not providing proper work for her.

The snow and freezing rain all melted off. There was a day when I couldn’t tell if it was raining or if the stuff falling from the sky was melting ice from the tree branches. The trunks were lathered with bubbles, there was so much water running everywhere. We live on a hill, and often the only thing keeping us from sliding down it are the fir trees. They take up an amazing amount of water, and when people higher on the hill cut down a lot of their trees I could really tell the difference in the runoff. Idiots. Branches on the roof are a small price to pay for stability underfoot.

I spent the weekend doing a revise on Harmony before sending it off to my agent and writing partner. It’s not going to see publication, I wrote it specifically and only because my agent wanted to read more YA from me and I wanted to give her a gift. Pretty much the only gift I do not suck at giving is my time and stories, so I invested heavily in this one. I hope she likes it. And my writing partner got it because, well, she kept me sane during finding said time to finish it. I agonized over spending time on it instead of a paying project, mostly because after the Steelflower fiasco and the concomitant financial hit things are tight.

I did try to open up the Steelflower 2 file on Sunday, just to see if the physical reaction had gone down. It hasn’t; I shook and dry-heaved into my office rubbish bin. The feeling of violation is as strong as ever, and I am despairing of it ever going away.

Anyway, I have Cormorant Run copyedits to deal with this week, and Afterwar wordcount to get in. There’s no such thing as a day off for the foreseeable future. I’m also contemplating a serial for my Patreon folks once the new year is here. If you’re interested in that sort of thing. I just have to decide which story simmering in the back of my head will do for such a thing.

And now, it’s time to get out the door and run. Gently and easily, but enough to work off Miss B’s fidgets and make her livable again. She knows, since I’m in my running togs, and is being Very Patient while I sit in front of the glowing magic box. The ways of the Hoomin Monkeys are strange to her, and she tries very hard to be patient, indeed. The need for action is twitching and trembling under her skin, and mine as well. Odd Trundles could also do with a constitutional, since it’s been too cold and slipper for his short-haired, clumsy self lately, poor fellow.

Off I go.

Pendulum, Post

wonder-woman Afterwar continues to fight me. Or more precisely, I continue to keep chipping away at it, my vision of what it should be interfering with what the book actually is, and once again I must learn submission to the shape of that is. I’ve had a good run of bookage I didn’t have to fight myself to carve free, lately, but this one seems fair to break that.

Part of the problem is that 2016 has been a very bad year. Death of loved ones both mine and others’, fascism stalking the land, intense stress, bad luck…the hits just keep on coming, and I keep hoping things will turn around. I am wavering between violent grief and equally violent hope, and both are bad for my nerves.

The other part of the problem is that this book is big and complex, and while I don’t have the entire shape of it, I know it’s larger than anything I’ve done so far. I get damn near paralyzed by the sheer size of the obstacle, forgetting I can break it into small chunks. When I do remember about the small chunks, there are so many of them scattered on the floor around me I get paralyzed by their sheer number. So I oscillate between too much detail and too much big-picture, with spates of furious working when the pendulum is passing between those two points. Once I get the first 50K of the book out of the way, some of the panic will be ameliorated, but…that’s a ways away.

With most books, the fear is, “I’m never going to finish and it will be crap anyway if I manage to do so.” This one is a heaping helping of “Oh, I’ll finish but it will be awful and the publisher will hate it and I’ll have to sell the house and THE SUN WILL GO OUT AND WE’LL ALL DIE.” So, you know, at least it’s something new to be afraid of? Every book is different, they all terrify one in different ways, it’s enough to make me type “why does Wonder Woman even bother” into Google just for a laugh.

Of course, Wonder Woman does bother. She bothers to do superhero things all the time, because it’s who she is. There’s a certain amount of comfort in answering one’s own silly question so definitively. Right now I’m just telling myself that even the worst years end, and at least 2016 isn’t the Year of the Divorce (which was bloody awful), and that I will finish Afterwar because I have no choice and even if it’s horrid, it will not be horrid and unfinished, and I can work with a whole corpse.

It’s not much, but it gets me through daily wordcount.

There is still no snow. There’s a bit of sunshine, which means it’s cold and clear. The hacking cough means I haven’t been running, but perhaps I can venture out for a short walk with Miss B, who is FULL OF ENERGY and does not understand why I am so slow and making such awful sounds at short intervals. She veers between worry and twitchiness, sort of like her owner.

Well. Time to wrap myself in a blanket and get the morning’s wordcount underway. Let’s hope the waning days of 2016 hold no more shocks or bad luck, hm?

Over and out.

Not Winning, Winning

I didn’t “win” NaNo this year. Well, I mean, technically I produced 70K in wordage, but 50K of that was spent on finishing the zero of Harmony. Which will never get published, goddammit, and is also not the NaNo goal I set myself.

Ah well. Win some, lose some. November was a hideous fucking month, for obvious reasons.

On the bright side, the zero draft of Harmony is finished, and Afterwar just broke 20K. The characters in the latter are beginning to do just as they please instead of what I’d prefer, so that’s a good sign. And I finally found a volunteer spot! Lots of places were swamped with volunteer candidates after the election, but I managed to find a place where I can do some good. So that gives me a warm fuzzy.

It’s getting chillier, and local squirrels are becoming braver. The Princess has sent me pictures of them crouching on the deck, eyeing the French door balefully. She’s not yet nervous, although I think she should be, because she sends those pictures when she’s at the table. I think the squirrels are trying to figure out how to break through said door and knock her down, preparatory to stealing whatever she’s snacking on at the time. She thinks I’m being ridiculous, and that there is no way a squirrel could break into our house.

Youth and optimism, right?

The library finally got a copy of The Angel of History for me to attempt. I bounced pretty hard off Alameddine’s first book, but I’m hoping this one will be the magic door. I also picked up another translation of Death in Venice, which I should read first while the other is still fresh in my head for the compare/contrast. So that’s my week’s reading sorted. Maybe, if this cold gets worse, I’ll put flannel sheets on my bed and just…retreat, for a day.

HA, WHO AM I KIDDING? I can’t afford to take a day off. Also, we’ve run out of tissues, so I’d be getting up every five minutes to blow my nose with toilet tissue. I refuse to put a roll of the latter next to my bed, for God’s sake. I’m not nearly ill enough for that.

Still, it’s nice to think of flannel sheets, lots of hot tea, and the luxury of simply reading for hours. One day I’ll set aside time just for that.

Right now, though, it’s back to work. I may not have won NaNo, but I still finished something, and that’s a spur to finish more. Winning enough for me, at least.

The State of the (Reading) Lili

Manuscript

It was a long weekend, my friends. The best part was Quasi-Surprise Houseguests, and the kids got to go see Fantastic Beasts. I did not want to go–I’m all Pottered out, I think. Besides, putting Eddie Redmayne (and his lips) in everything is beginning to wear on my nerves a bit. He’s a good actor, but I’ve reached full saturation on him for a while. But hey, the kids liked it! I’m told it’s very visually stunning.

Instead, I spent the movie evening at home with Mann’s Death in Venice, finishing it the next morning as I stood in my office, spellbound. I’d never read any Mann before, and this was the Heim translation, which I’m told differs significantly from an older one. Now I suspect I’ll have to compare/contrast translations. It’s sad that I can’t read it in the original, a German-speaking friend tells me the sentences are marvelous bits of architecture.

I went straight from that into a book on the Korean War, but I bounced off that pretty quickly. There was a passage of breathtaking racism, not from an interview but from the author, and that killed it for me. I’ve moved on to Reza Aslan’s Zealot and Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed; the former is extremely readable and I’m hoping the latter will scratch my itch for something similar to Sir Walter Scott.

My bedtime reading, however, is Schom’s The Eagle and the Rising Sun, which is also eminently readable. Schom has an eye for human details, and though at least one reviewer got snitty about it, I enjoy my history with such little pleats and finishes sprinkled through. I hadn’t quite realized what an asshole MacArthur was in the Second World War. In the First he was a hero, there is no doubt. In the Second, well. Schom is clear about the old-boy network that protected MacArthur from the consequences of his actions, compounding the error and basically spitting on those who died as a direct result of his malfeasance and arrogance.

My Civil War research for Afterwar has reached a bit of a snag. I was halfway through Stampp on slavery in the antebellum South, but I had to lay that aside for a little bit. Current events make it even more stomach-churning than normal. Maybe when I finish the Manzoni I’ll be able to handle it emotionally. I think I have enough stuffed in my head that I just need to let it bubble and start finding my handholds inside the shape of the story itself. Later I’ll research for specifics and work my way through the backlog, but I need a breath or two before the plunge, so to speak.

I started logging my reading in an Excel spreadsheet a couple years back. It sometimes provides a necessary spur, but my inability to make charts of the information is maddening. It’s not Excel’s fault, it’s a function of my own complete non-understanding of even the most basic spreadsheet things, which drives me even crazier. I dislike being awful at things (who doesn’t?) and it would be nice to see, for example, how male and female authors stack up in my yearly reading total. So far this year, I’ve only finished forty-four books, but in my defense, that includes monstrous ones like War & Peace and Foote’s Civil War trilogy. I’d love to go at the moderate pace of a book a week, but life interferes. *sigh*

For now, it’s Monday, and that means a run and the creation of more words. I was able to luxuriate in reading for the past two days, but now it’s back to producing. Fueled, the engine inside my head is already at a high rev. It’s time for Callas singing Medea and some initial wordcount before I run to jar the rest of the day’s work loose.

Over and out.