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Found a couple of new shows, Bosch, which is a police procedural set in LA starring Titus Welliver and a whole slew of other grads from good shows, and The Expanse, which takes gritty in-system space opera to new and interesting heights, also, depths. My tax dollars at work, yay!

 

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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).

Most fun parts: working various filk songs into the narrative, a phony Reddit AMA that was a gas to write, using 30 years of Paul nattering on at me about aviation, specifically ridge lift and gliding, and planning how I’d take over Vancouver without invading it, if I was an alien. It’s all in the social engineering, but who do you approach first and why?

 

No progress

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.

No progress

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.

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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.

 

 

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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.

No one wants to hear about my innards

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.