Category: Writing

Ah, rewatched CQB.  I caught a bunch of things – all tiny technical things that just make it SO GOOD – that I didn’t catch during the first glorious watch, when I was on the edge of my seat with excitement and happiness and terror.

Why do I ever stop taking vitamin D? I feel better right away, and the sleep is more solid although not long enough, as always.

I am mucking about with pluripotent stem cells and biocompatible carbon nanotube lattices.

Jeff and I loved the first season of The Expanse so much we are re-watching it the instant we finished it. Up next, the episode CQB, which has some of the best and most realistic “fighting in space” sequences ever made for television, and a memorably grisly and arresting shot of the consequences of taking a railgun round to the, er, person when the gravity is acting up. If you’re squeamish, give this one a miss. And when we are done with the rewatch, we have to wait until 2017 for more. Favourite line of the show so far from character ‘Amos’ as he’s strapping autodocs onto two fellow crew: “You guys are really messed up, it keeps trying to put you in hospice.”

Honestly, that sounds like a line I’d write, so, hellyeah I like it.

Joan Jett concert tonight with Mike, lunch today with Katie.  Thinking of renting a car to come to Victoria next weekend as the Bengal Lounge is closing and there is going to be a meeting of drunken lefties there and I’d like to see J. and the new kitties.  Plus my mother.  I can’t find the manuscript for the second book, which is crazy making, but it hasn’t left the house so I’m not worried.

It is possible but unlikely that I will bring offspring to Victoria but nothing is for sure.

Interview went well but there are many candidates.  Sounds like the church is a lot better at being a church for all nations than Beacon ever was.

Margot just came in and I put her in the window for a good view, and she actually stayed there and looked around for a while.  Buster watched cat videos with me the other morning.  He does that occasionally; he comes into my bedroom and ‘assumes the video watching position’ which is adorable. He is an extremely catly cat, and we loves him. Margot is just a pleasant fur generator by comparison, but she still has enough personality to make it interesting.

Light day writing.

LOVING The Expanse. Bosch is okay; the opening titles are surpassing brilliant.

Great day writing yesterday, despite the fact my cold seems to have come back or whatever the hell it is; chills and large variations in how hungry I was. Missed dinner with J. and Shad, dang.

I have no idea if I’ll write that much today, but I’ve got a couple of chapters open, so we’ll see.

 

The hardest parts of these novels, so far. 1. Not using gendered slurs. 2. Gender nonconforming character using plural pronouns (more difficult than I could have originally conceived, and will have to be poofread with ludicrous amounts of effort). 3. Having the person I’m writing the books for ask me to improve the outcome for a character and I’m so indulgent I’m doing it, which is resulting in interesting wrinkles. 4. Not using religious swearing of any kind (except for one character, for humorous effect) and writing abusive language without recourse to any of the normal go-tos, for example, not being able to use the word ‘crazy’ Honestly, try getting by without crazy! I’ve had to invent some bizarre phrases to try to cover ‘crazy’ without being ableist. 5. Writing about the interaction between local First Nations and aliens without cultural appropriation (essentially having to erect a literary and legal firewall).

 

I read the on line five part 9.0 earthquake in Portland future history so you don’t have to.  IT IS SO FULL OF ERRORS, VERB TENSES NOT AGREEING, TYPOS and sentences which do not make any logical sense, please don’t read it until that guy has had a chance to fix it.  All of it.  His editor should have an autoerotic asphyxiation near miss.

I made up a word in German yesterday and it got more retweets on twitter than practically anything I’ve ever done there.  Airport grief beer (expensive shitty beer) is the translation.

I swapped out my mattress yesterday.  I am now sleeping on foam again. The other mattress had enormous divots in it.  Don’t buy floor models, yeah I’m dumb.  I had a restful night of sleep and am now contemplating with nerveless misery shoving everything that came off the top bunk back into corners.  The urge to just set it all on fire is rather large.

Time for some coffee.

Cheque off to the editor for the second novel. (Finally…)

Still recovering from the cough but feel much better.

Hope everybody has a lovely lovely day!

I hope to get back at it today.  Lovely steak and spag dinner with Mike last night; the Union Jack knows how to cook a steak. He’s now off to rural Connecticut for something to do with his job but he’ll be back in time, he promises, to take me to Joan Jett on the 8th.

Finally saw Deadpool and really enjoyed it.

I am a wreck. One more practice of the children’s story and I’ll go iron my dress.

Paul’s coming to get me in less than an hour.

This number brings us up to yesterday – I haven’t actually written anything today yet.

I am still sick in that I am coughing.  I am quite weak – standing for any length of time is quite difficult.  I keep trying to clean up the kitchen and I honestly can’t stand that long. The horror that is my internal workings continues unabated. I’ve never suffered from this extensive a disinclination to eat when I wasn’t actually running a temperature in my whole life.  I literally can look at nourishing food, and my body rejects the idea of eating it.  I can force myself to eat rice, have maybe one piece of leftover chicken tikka, and drink sweet tea with lemon since there’s no milk in the house and I don’t have it together to get more. I thought about ordering a pizza last night but the idea of paying for it and then just staring at it for a while was too much. I got up and ate three tiny chunks of chicken, forced down some spearmint tea, and went back to bed.  Thus the continued chaos.  I was eating ice cream but I think it made things a lot worse.

 

Jeff seems to have escaped the worst of it thank goodness.

I DON’T believe it. Other earthlike planets exist, and his calculations are wrong-o, me bucko.

 

 

B-b-b-blasting along.  Working flat out on two different sections – when I get stuck on one I go back the other.  Exciting stuff!  George has made a truce with his hair so he can go rescue the Oldest, he has made an evil plan and da boys are drinking on a rooftop garden and talking about life.

After being stalled for so long it sure is nice to see the ticker over 40K.  I won’t have it done by the beginning of April, but it won’t be long now.

Let’s just take it as read that I’m experiencing ghastliness. Cough is down to a dull roar.  Fever comes and goes, never very high.  Jeff is starting to cough.  I FEEL TERRIBLE about this but ey what can you do.

I did remember when I last felt this bad.  The two weeks before we moved to Toronto from Montreal I got chicken pox. I ran a temp of 102 FOR A WEEK and took permanent scars on my chin and forehead. That would have been 20 years ago.

I’m feeling so downcast about just about everything, and it doesn’t help.  I need to do something life affirming and happy, and I simply cahn’t. I am working on revisions though.  My word order is crazy salad sometimes.