In Which Our Heroine Regains Her Eight-Track Mind

20 May 2003

I'm not sure what it is about Mondays and neck pain the last few weeks. If I took normal weekends, I'd say that it's the return to the computer or something like that, but I don't. So I don't know.

On the up side, I dreamed that Mark and I went to Paris and saw the lions at Notre Dame. I know there aren't lions at Notre Dame. There probably aren't herds of gazelle, either, but in my dream they were quite well-known, the gazelles of Notre Dame.

Which sounds like a short story title, so I wrote it down as such. I have no idea what it would be about, though.

Anyway, my dream didn't have any of this heavenly lion-lying-down-with-the-gazelle stuff. There was throat-ripping. Mark was remarkably unworried that the throat-ripping would extend from the gazelles to us, in this dream. Five-cent psychoanalyze that, if you like.

So far, Alex Irvine's A Scattering of Jades is one of those examples of a well-written speculative novel that just doesn't grab me. I don't particularly care about the characters. I don't think this is Irvine's fault. I think it's just a mismatch of book and reader. It's too bad, though, because I really would like to be drawn headfirst into this book.

I ran some errands yesterday, and now of course there are more errands. I will not be running them today. I will be taking Timprov to the doctor and going hiking with Mark. And otherwise working on the book. Maybe talking to Scott, which I tried to do last night, but I was too mentally focused on getting reservations done and all of that to make it a good conversation, so rather than blathering in an unsatisfying way, I asked if we could try again some other night this week. If he'd indicated that he really needed to talk, I would have attempted to wrench my brain from its one track of the time. But he didn't indicate that, so.

Now that the tickets are purchased, I'm back to thinking about more than one thing at a time. Which is a relief -- I'm used to having the proverbial eight-track mind. One is disconcerting.

I think the character I'm adding to the Not The Moose Book will be yet another "how did you conceive of this book without her?" character. I have ceased to be surprised by this. This book is much larger than me. So Tyyne Korhonen is new. Ansa Nikkanen was new once, and you won't believe it when you read the book. (And I'm happy because Orvokki's last name means "sunny brink," which is a funny thing for a last name to mean, yet appropriate for Orvokki. I like Orvokki. I think one of the edits I have to do will probably be more Orvokki, and then another will have to be less Orvokki. Ah well. It works that way. And Jatta's last name means mountain or danger. The name people claim that danger has nothing to do with this last name, despite it being the same word, and I frankly do not believe them. That's like claiming that people get named Max Power but really it has something to do with mishearing the German for "farmer" or something. Nonsense! It's all about the power!)

Hmmmm. I think I'm going to need to sit down with the outline again. I hope people don't ask me whether I outline my books, when I'm so wildly successful that I buy Tempest a car.* Because the right answer would have to be, "Yes, but I'm wrong."

* I was grousing about the dearth of YA short story markets with Tempest, and I said I'd have to make them into a collection. She said it'd make people forget Harry Potter, and I promised her that if I wrote a YA short story collection that outsold Harry Potter, I would buy her a car. Just like the hokey-pokey, that's what it's all about.

Well, crud. That was supposed to be the end of that, as you can tell by the footnote dealie, sitting right there. But we have a change of plans: Timprov seems to have caught a virus, either my old one or someone else's, because he's been getting worse for several days. Today he's all lymphy and sick and nasty, in ways orthogonal to the doctor he was supposed to see today. So we're not going to make it into that appointment, but we'll hope Thursday's works out. It's frustrating to have someone sick in long-term ways and then have short-term ways of being sick interfere with that, but I suppose it's just as likely to happen, if not more so, than if someone has no long-term health issues. (Short version of that: sick people get colds, too.) So he's drinking plenty of orange juice and resting up, we hope, and probably not going to the baseball game tomorrow. Which is too bad, but it makes more sense than having him go and be miserable.

At least now we know when we're each going to be gone this summer and can plan around that. This makes me feel better in ways I can't even put my finger on. And Mark and I will still go for a hike, and there are still positive things in the day. I'm even making chicken soup for lunch so that there will be positive things for the sicko.

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