altisidora11

1700 words today, when I had only promised myself 3 pages. I'm pretty pleased with that--and I got it done fast, by my standards, though not by those of people who write fast.

That brings us to a nice 37,000 words, and 185 pages. Maybe two more writing days to a vacation. OMG. (Yeah, my vacations look like other people's weekends. Such is life.)

It's very good to be back in the saddle again. I haven't written a whole new book since Chill, and it's amazng how much of my self-identity is locked up in being somebody who produces new novel-length stories.

Now, I get to eat some lunch and drink some tea and goof off until it's time to go climb. Then I shall come home and work a bit more, I expect, until Criminal Minds. The last new one for a while.

It's almost the end of the Naughties. I still have hopes of making the decade name catch on. After all, once we're out of it, we'll need something to call it....

(Yes, I know technically speaking 2010 is part of the same decade, but functionally? It's not. Nobody refers to 1970 as "the sixties." The map is not the territory, and trying to make the way people interact with reality conform to an ideal results in such crowning successes as, oh, Esperanto.)

First, in one week (more or less) we have new mid-hiatus Shadow Unit content--Sarah Monette's Very Special Holiday Episode, "On Faith." Yay!
 
Tea today is Roibos Pretoria (the last of it; time to shop for more--in the Mythical After Time, anyway: see below.)
Teacup is NPR's "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me"
Temperature this morning was 26 degrees. Would have been colder but I slept late.

Today, I am as bereft of ambition as it is possible for me to be. But I have a plan! A kind of overarching plan. My plan is to get to page 200 of Grail, which is, after all, only 23 pages away, and then take a couple of days off. After that, I will revise The White City and finish "The Unicorn Evils" with coffeeem and "The Forty Times Forty" and turn those in. And then I will come back and finish the second half of Grail, which might go more easily than the first half. (It often does.)

Then truepenny and I will write A Reckoning of Men, and I will write "Spell 81a" (with stillsostrange) and "Ligature" (all by myself). And then I will write The Steles of the Sky and these various short stories I owe. The space opera and the vampire thing and the other thing.

And today may be a writing-and-paperwork day rather than a writing day, as I have somehow again accrued an awful lot of paperwork. Although what I really want to do is drink tea and look at the Seeds of Change catalogue.

There. Plan. Now to start it....

In other news, jmeadows is evil and wicked. She's trying to convince me to take up spinning, you see. (I used to embroider. I do not knit. Or crochet. I cheerfully wear nice things that other people knit or crochet for me, however, so the idea of spinning for friends is not beyond possibility.) I keep telling her that my poor guitar needs me, and I do not need another expensive time-consuming hobby, but then she shows me things like this, or this. And I am sore tempted.

Thankfully, all discretionary purchases are on hold until the mythical After time ("After Tor pays me") and so I am safe. For a little while.

And maybe by then the urge will have passed.

meme.

First sentences, 2009!

January: The sun is melting the frost off the inside of the windows, the cat is complaining, and my toes are cold.

February: Busy but pleasant day today.

March: This is what rock climbing has done for me:

April: 9. All stories end the same way. It's easy when you know how.

May: At first, I thought the email was a very clever phishing scheme. [That was one of my rare locked posts, so no link.]

June: batwrangler has graciously posted her photos of the Wrentham dog shows on her flickr account, including some pics of the Giant Ridiculous Dog and the Lesser Ridiculous Dog.

July: Seattle, day 5. Still no bukkit.

August: I've been up and working since 6:30, and the dogge needs to go out and chase the ball and then have a walk and his breakfast, and so do I (I thought of something I really, really wanted to eat today last night and now I can't remember what it was, except it involved whole wheat toast. Maybe if I look in the fridge I will remember. Maybe I'll make home-made tortilla chips today, around reading my slush and finding some other Useful Work to do. Maybe I will clean the downstairs or something. Oh, and sending out some packages, because it's not actually Sunday, Bear.).

September: Forty-eight glorious degrees fahrenheit this morning.

October: O Perfect Timing!

November: Death to daylight savings!

December: Today I must:

Thank God for men with daughters.

It's not only you, mind. But overall, more often than other men, you guys make me feel like you believe I'm a human being, and other women are too.

Thank you for that, guys. Because I suspect you don't actually hear it often.

Item the first: yes, I have seen the new Simon's Cat. And now so have you. 

Item the second: I really, really, really did not want to work today. But I applied butt to couch and told myself I could quit after four pages, and by then my peeps had shown up and were working, so I got 2300. Go, peeps. Go book.

See? Progress? Progress is so comforting. Especially since once ashacat's baby comes, I expect there will be a week or so when I am being Baby Support and do not get much done. And I want to get a draft of this book finished (Even a Bad Draft) so that I can fix The White City and its chapbook "The Forty times Forty" and send them to Bill.

35300 / 100000 words. 35% done!

177 / 400 pages. 44% done!

Item the third: here's a cute photo of the existing beloved godchild, with me and The Jeff (not in that order).



That's what my hair looked like after the purple washed out. It's the Rare Good Photo of me, so enjoy it. *g*

Item the fourth: People turn around a lot in Greg Brown songs.

Overheard on NPR this morning

Well, no. They have better Cuban food there, for one thing. And much nicer beaches.

Tea this morning: mango passionfruit
Teacup this morning: I rinsed out the kitty in filing drawer cup.
Temperature: 42 degrees. Hardly worth recording.

And now, yoga, and then slouching towards work. Time to blow up something. Possibly a space ship and a couple of world leaders.

...huh. I have this sudden sense I've got my grove back. More carnage: fixes problems every time.

Did I mention I climbed a 5.10 yesterday? (okay, yes, I'm still geeked. But then, when I started climbing, one of the things I said to myself was "I would like to be good enough at this to climb 5.10 someday." And while having sent one 5.10a on the slab in not the same thing as climbing 5.10, not really, it puts it within reach. It's visible now, in a way it wasn't before. So cooooooool.)

Ooops.

Realized today that I started Grail about 130 pages too early, and, in fact, the first scene is the scene I wrote today. Alas, the life of the working writer.

Howeveer, I may be able to recycle some of that earlier stuff. I just need to remember that in an interesting novel, terrorism comes before politics, rather than politics before terrorism.

On the other hand, that route was a 5.10a, and I sent it again today. Also got a new one I think is a 5.8, and while I did not get a hold higher on the sky wall monster, I did get unclipped today. Wednesday, the goal is two holds higher. Dammit.

Well, that's 1800 words for the day, and a third of a book by MS word count. And I appear to have finally found the plot, so if I can make the 150 pages of setup the readers will have to get through interesting, I may have a publishable book here eventually.

Mean things: epistemology, mind control, social tyranny, toxic memes, minority rule, oligarchy. The usual, really. I need to blow something up.

Maybe tomorrow, or Wednesday.

In any case, now time for a little nap or something before massage therapy appointment, food, and climbing.

tea today: market spice
temperature this morning: 34 degrees
teacup today: cat in a filing drawer

33100 / 100000 words. 33% done!

166 / 400 pages. 42% done!

Watching old episodes of Mythbusters totally makes me appreciate why women date supervillains.

Just sayin'.

Happy birthday to tammypierce, coffeeem, and the Giant Ridiculous Dog.

(Ace is four, if you were wondering.) 

And now, time to get ready to go haul wood for my mom. It's December, I hear.

Last night, I realized that Grail needs an antagonist to get me through the early chapters, until the actual conflict kicks in. Well, drat that, anyway. Antagonists are so... 19th century.

Well, there you go. Carbon footprint justified for another day, sort of, as much as it ever is.

Man, it's a good thing the inside of my head is posted private property. Some days, I have more in common with the Grey Wolf than evolution would prefer.

Or, as Lyda Morehouse once said of me, "This woman is not on our side."

Mean Things: Eschaton; cultural relativism; words that don't mean the same thing you think they mean.

31300 / 100000 words. 31% done!

159 / 400 pages. 40% done!


I think tomorrow might be a Day Off. I kind of need one.

Commencing work this morning with a dog who says the floor is much, much, much too cold, and can't you please turn on the summer, monkey?

Tea today is a nice Assam from Upton (Mokalbari East); teacup today is an autumnul Chinese cup with leaves and berries and cherry blossoms.

Temperature this morning: 24 degrees.

Apparently, les smice have been eating my pie overnight:



I did not know that les smice used forks, however.

Not actually sure what work is getting done today--I think I'm going to go poke at Grail and see what happens. Having a third of it drafted is very reassuring: the end seems so much more attainable from here than from zero: I mean, 250 pages is little enough room that I start worrying about running out of space rather than how on earth am I going to fill this with interesting narrative?

And in conclusion, a dog loves you.

Dear Congresscritter Larson & Sen. Dodd (any you, too, Joe, you useless sack of paranoid hypocrisy);

Darling Fascist Bullyboys,

Earlier this week while attempting to return to his native soil, Canadian citizen Dr. Peter Watts was pepper sprayed, beaten, detained, and dumped in his shirtsleeves in the sub-freezing cold of a Michigan snowstorm by Port Huron crossing border guards. These guards, in what I believe to be an attempt to cover up their malfeasance, have charged him with assaulting a federal officer. A police report that directly contradicts Dr. Watts' account of events (and the reasonable timeline of events--why would a Canadian who had already been in America for some time be entering the US?) has been filed. Apparently there are video tapes, but they--and the police report--have been withheld from the press.

Dr. Watts is a colleague and a personal friend of mine. He is a marine biologist and a distinguished and critically acclaimed author. I know him to be a gentle and civilized human being, an intellectual, and someone I would without hesitation trust with a key to my home. He is and has for many years been engaged in feral cat rescue; I have seen him stop on the street to give a homeless man money--and an argument, because with Peter, everything comes with an argument. While he is a gentle man, he is not meek.

The sin that "provoked" this gross abuse of power was apparently Dr. Watt's continued questioning of why American border guards were searching the car of a Canadian citizen returing to Canada. As you are no doubt aware, this is not standard procedure.

I believe he questioned the authority of the border patrol, and that is why he was beaten, thrown drenched and under-dressed into a cold holding cell, and eventually dumped at the border.

There are those that will say he asked for it; that he should have cringed more. That he should have been meek in the face of authority, and anticipating the abuse of it. That he should have been cowed.

But do we wish to become a society that enforces meekness in the face of abuses of authority on pain of physical abuse? There are other societies that have enforced the rule of law through terror. I do you the dignity of assuming that you do not need reminding of their names and infamy.

Or do we wish to be able to say proudly that our society is one of free citizens consenting to be governed, and is strong enough to stand up to a few hard questions? The Quakers, a venerable and peaceable American institution, have a saying: "Speak truth to power." Benjamin Franklin--a venerable and perhaps somewhat less peaceable American institution--famously said, "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

This time, Dr. Watt's abusers made a mistake--this time, they chose to batter an internationally known and respected author with friends and fans on six continents. But how many other individuals have suffered this kind of savagery?

My friends who are foreign nationals are afraid to come to the United States. They are afraid of the consequences. I have heard so many tales in the past few days of harrassment, cruelty, and outright abuse from American customs agents--both against foreign nationals traveling on legitimate business and American citizens returning home--that I wish I sould say I was appalled. But the fact of the matter is, it came as no surprise to me.

I have had some delightful experiences with American border guards. I suspect most of them are professionals in a hard and scary job, charged with a great responsibility and inadequate resources, doing the very best they c an. But I have also met a few who I easily believe would haul a middle-aged former college professor out of his car in the middle of the night and brutalize him.

Terrorism is, by definition, the evil art of waging war by inflicting terror. By cowing the enemy. Are we terrorists? Are the innocent citizens of our friendly and allied neighbor enemies to be cowed?

The charges against Dr. Watts must be dropped.

The US Customs Agents guarding our borders must receive adequate training and support, and those who abuse their authority must be weeded out.

This is wrong and it must stop.


Love,

me

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ETA I'm Creative Commonsing the text of this letter. Feel free to swipe, revise, remix, and use any bits you like as a model for your own communications with your elected representatives.


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