2 May 2006

Last night I dreamed that my birthday party turned into a convention. Well-wishers take note: I do not wish to have panel items at my birthday party, particularly panel items about population growth. Also -- and I'm not sure this has anything to do with cons at all -- I do not wish to have Regency-dress tableaux on Virtue And Beauty, featuring my high school classmates. My birthday isn't until late July, but I'm giving you this kind of notice so you can plan ahead and cancel the draperies and the microphones. Tell the former Ralston High Student Government officers that it's really all right if they make other plans for that day.

I had that kind of sleep that's so hard and so deep that you wake up and think, "That sleep was exhausting. I should take a nap." And maybe I will, after I've walked the dog this afternoon. Stranger things have happened.

I'm reading Gwyneth Jones's Kairos, which was written in 1988, and there are little things that are just so strange. I keep thinking, "How can 1988 be a foreign country when I lived in it?" And not just lived, but wrote and read things -- even some adult things. It's not the worldbuilding of the near-future setting. It's the casual social assumptions built into how things get phrased. I'm still enjoying it, but there have been four or five sentences I had to read three times over to get the meaning through, across not even two decades and only one ocean and not even the big one at that.

It's one of those days where I keep thinking, "If I had any ham, I could have ham and eggs, if I had any eggs." I don't want ham and eggs -- featuring ham as it so conspicuously does -- but the point remains: I keep coming up with ideas I can't even partially implement. Mostly this is a culinary problem, but there's one short story I could write if only I had a plot for it, and if only I had characters. What I have instead is one line and an itch. This is not useful.

So instead I will pick The Mark of the Sea Serpent back up and finish with the puffins for the time being and maybe write the climax of the book. Not long left now. Soon I'll be done with this draft, and I think it'll be a pretty clean draft, so I can start trying to remember who has read Dwarf's Blood Mead so I can send them MSS for critique. (If that's you, please e-mail me.)