October 4/0 words
The week has been relatively calm--for the most part. Either that or I'm growing armor to deflect the slings and arrows kindergarten's been tossing my way.
Little irritations, really. Nothing major, although the balancing act between class management, union stuff, grade chair stuff, and testing the new math materials for next year wears me out. One more week until that well-deserved break.
I have no plans for my week off. We zoom off to Fresno for a family wedding that Friday afternoon, but will return on Sunday. So. Seven days with nothing planned. I think the house will consume my attention--Thanksgiving may be here, and if that's so, we could have upwards of 20+ mouths to feed and bodies to seat. (Yeah, this made perfect sense last year at my sister's. We'll see if it still makes sense to everyone at the wedding.)
I opened another halfway finished story, which had stalled for now-what?! ideas. I'm in the process of generating now-what possibilities, because it just seemed like I'd boxed my protag in this situation, with no way for her to rescue herself. But there's got to be a way, right? Right?
(Lie to my right brain. It just sucks that stuff up.)
So, yeah. I'm staring at it and am thoroughly convinced I need to focus on the ending for completeness. I'm not certain how much I want her to grow, and in what direction--so nailing that down, I hope, will provide clarity to what must happen in the middle.
Or I could just thrust the eleven pages I've got in people's faces and ask them what they think should happen next. Because, damn. I hates this, I do.
We won't mention the clockwork story, because that's stalled at 1200 words. Another story that I don't quite know what the ending should be. At least, not completely.
And then, it's time to get the other story--my buttonholes one--out to another market. Sadly, there's a lot of places to go, and a few of them cross timelines. I really have to choose one among the pro markets I've got on the list. Maybe I shouldn't start with the most unlikely, which in this case would be Glimmer Train. It, at least, reopens, which some of the other markets won't do, because it's a one-shot deal.
I foresee more hemming and hawing in my future.
And arguing with one very stubborn dog who doesn't like getting her feet wet in order to take care of needs outside.
Yeah, too bad, Zoey. I think 'bath' is on the list for you, too.
Then there is the re-loading of Skype, and the tweaking to get it to work right with the sound coming through my headphones instead of my speakers. With any luck, that'll be finished today, too. I hope. Because talking to the Posse falls more along the lines of fun than real work, although we do get some work done, when we're chatting away. Srsly.
October 6/0 words
Still no actual word count--but there has been progress in sorting out what I want to have the ending be.
So yeah. This is an experiment in seeing if a fairy tale structure will work for an adult SF story. That's all I'm saying at the moment, so if (and when) you read it, you'll just have to attempt to figure which fairy tale and who represents what on your own. I'm not telling.
Anyway, I've got to get my protag home. That's a given. Along with her better able to deal with her mother. Which is also a given. Along with having her prepared to attend her cousin's wedding to her ex-boyfriend, and able to deal with the emotional backwash from that.
But how to do that when she's been captured by space pirates at the colony where she's had to deliver supplies?
What the pirates want? Oh, hell, who knows. Something that the colony has that they need. And Esmi Roesi (I'm so impressed I came up with that name--I love it, I do.) ends up caught in the middle of this little piratical power play.
The hardest part right now is coming up with whatever she does to extract herself from this situation. And I still don't really know how she does that, other than that she does with the help of an unlikely alliance that I've already managed to set up via my right brain's ability to plan ahead.
Now if the right brain would only kick out the salient points I need to wrap this story up, it would be helpful. But since when has my right brain been anything like helpful? Mostly it holds all the cards close to its chest and suggests that I just figure it out based on my own hand. Yeah. That would be the one where I hold a three, a six, and a queen, with no hope of accomplishing anything critical with that pair of twos.
I'll work on that while I vacuum.
Space and vacuum go together, right?
Eesh.
Oh, and the baby is coming for a visit with the middle child and his fianceé.
Maybe the baroque we have playing will soothe him, so he stops chewing the world.
And horses have wings. Right.
October 15/0 words
It's a lovely October morning, and someone punched me between the eyes while I was sleeping.
Smoke, I presume. We have another clear swathe of sky directly overhead--smoke to the left, smoke to the right--but the particulates don't differentiate. Damn them. My house is filling slowly with ash.
Did I mention it's fire season?
My time has been sucked up by family. We zipped to Fresno for a weekend to celebrate my nephew's wedding, which was lovely (and somewhat decadent for a wedding at home. I mean, two trolleys to shift people from house to wedding site and back? Sliders and sweet potato fries at a small cart for a few of the appetizers? The neighborhood alone made me feel that I was financially out of touch, and let's not mention the women's clothing with the detailing that screamed big bucks.) So yeah, lovely. And expensive. Someone told me that the average US wedding runs $30K now, and I just shake my head. I think ours (way back when) ran us... um... maybe 600. Dollars. Back when dollars meant something.
I've been playing the watching game with my IRA these past few weeks. Down 15K, up 3K yesterday, who knows where I'll be tomorrow. I don't even what to know about how CalPers is doing. That's too scary to contemplate. Still, no one around here is going to be getting a 30K wedding. I promise. I discovered at some point during the visit that I had promised to make the middle child's fiancee's wedding dress. Do I remember this?
No. But okay. It's been a while since the last four (a generation, let's say) and of those dresses, only 50% of the marriages are still whole. Well, whole with black heel marks on the trains and maybe a few rips and cigarette burns. (Am I bitter? Of course not. Maybe this generation will do far better than my own.) I'm also grateful that the bride in question is not my daughter. The slug's vision of what things I've made for her since her childhood (primarily related to Halloween costumes) has always been disappointed in the reality. I don't believe a designer would have better luck. It's all about seeing yourself accurately in the outfit, and if you can't accomplish that, the reality never measures up. So yeah. Add one more thing to the list.
It's my vacation this week. I'm doing things like cleaning out the pantry and relining all my shelves in the kitchen. It's an ugly job, but who else would touch it? I'm working, again, on eradicating ants. You think cats are picky about their food choices? Let me introduce you to my ants. Ants, readers. Readers, ants. How picky are they?
They've rejected my poison. Their little line now winds around the poison bait rather than over and in as I had hoped. I've seen these things attack fat and sugar, and I wish I could find sweetened mayonnaise in a trap. With poison.
Maybe I just need poisoned syrup, seeing that I found them swimming in the unpoisoned variety in my pantry (which spawned the cleaning.)
We've also accomplished getting the moldings up in the bedroom, which is only crown molding on the window wall, since our ceiling rises to the peak on the opposite wall. There will be touch up painting today, and the verdict is to frame the window in the same molding, so there will be a trip to Home Depot in my future.
Then we just need a window treatment, some kind of shade which the Spousling insists on calling a balloon shade, which in no way resembles the real thing. Once we got over the minor hurdle of defining his terms, that was an easy agreement.
So, a moderate list of accomplishments, but no writing as of yet. I'm popping into chat later this afternoon/evening for a touch of the lash, which is so ably administered by its inhabitants.
Now, however, I should go check where exactly the fire is this morning. Last night it was licking the far end of Simi Valley, which is a good fifteen minute drive from my house, but it's a lot closer than that because fires don't necessarily follow the freeway. And there are dry hilltops all along the way.
I just can't believe this one will get as close to us as the one a few years back, when it was less than a mile or so away.
Every October, I have to ask myself again: why do I live in SoCal?
Oh yeah, the job. Right.
