6 August 2003

Yesterday, the plan was to feel better. It's still the plan. It didn't get very far yesterday (except that I have fewer of the dizzy spots in my field of vision, so that's good -- but they're bigger, so that's not so good). I still think it's a sound plan. We'll be working on it.

I worked on stuff. That stuff included "Heart-Shaped Hole" and "Making Alex Frey" again. I think it was time for me to write another near-future SF story, because I've been missing that mode. Many of my characters have some areas of geekage, because I believe people who are really, really into something are more interesting than people who don't have anything they're passionate about. But the characters in "Making Alex Frey" feature a few more hard-core geeks. It's similar to "Small Talk" in that way -- in a couple of ways, actually. But I still like "Small Talk," and they're not going to be even close to identical. So. Not so much a problem there. I'll want to do some novel stuff today, but short story work is good, too.

I didn't bake, but I made polenta and marinated portobellos and roasted red peppers. It was all right, but I won't be using that portobello marinade again any time soon -- it was just not that great. Maybe today with the baking. Hmm. We'll see. It'll depend on how I'm feeling, probably, and whether it seems like it might make me feel better.

I finished reading The Fortunate Fall and really liked it -- I'll be looking for a copy at some point. Definitely worth owning. I started Charles de Lint's A Handful of Coppers and put it on the return pile after a few of the short stories in it. I don't know...maybe it was the mood I was in, but high fantasy adventure shorts were just not doing it for me. I like de Lint enough that I'll probably go back and read the rest of the stories at some point, but it was too much of a muchness for me, and the wrong muchness at that. I breezed through Katherine Paterson's Lyddie, which was the opposite of The Fortunate Fall: the ending, in both cases, was not what I expected, but in the case of The Fortunate Fall, I was happily surprised. Whereas with Lyddie I felt that it was random and not particularly appropriate -- more appropriate to the message the author wanted to send than to the character she'd developed. I also started reading William Gibson's Pattern Recognition, but I didn't get far enough into it to say whether it's any good or not.

The library sent me a form yesterday that said, oops, so sorry, you know two of the books we said you could reserve? Well, we can't actually find them anywhere. While this is not the most positive possible outcome (of me getting to read these books), at least they know they've got books missing now and won't be telling poor hapless library patrons that they've got them. It makes me want to put holds on other books that interest me and never seem to show up on the shelves, just so that they notice that they don't have them. And then they can use their huge library budget to buy replacement copies.

Heehee. Huge library budget. Hee. Sorry.

Blueberries are good for sick people, right? Nothing wrong with blueberries. Please tell me there's nothing wrong with blueberries. We have all kinds of good fruit around here, including two pints of blueberries. They seem like happy things, but it just occurred to me that I don't know if there's a flavor of illness for which you shouldn't eat blueberries. Maybe they're universally good. Yeah. Let's hope for that. But if you know otherwise, do tell me.

It's strange how quickly accomplishments pass out of my head. As I was working on "Heart-Shaped Hole," I started thinking, wow, it'll be good to get a new story out there. I haven't written a new story in a long time. When, in fact, I wrote two last week. Silly brain.

The water for tea is boiling on the stove, and I'm going to drink some of the tea (less tea to move!) and then be a wuss and lie down for awhile. I'll get things done after that, of course. No neglecting the list. But also no neglecting the dizzy spots.

I dislike being sick. In case you wondered.

Update: today is the birthday of both Rob and Julie. Many happy returns to you both!