Interruptions

Technology and bodies. They're both great when they work. Neither of mine did last week, hence the lack of posting. Life is rough.

And now I'm behind on everything and won't be posting much to any purpose because my hard-earned energy needs to be spent catching up on stuff that directly benefits me, like cleaning the bathroom, researching, and putting together new agent queries. And making a birthday cake. Because tomorrow is my birthday, and thanks to stupid health stuff I can't just ask Baskin Robbins to make me a jamoca almond fudge ice cream cake, I have to bake my own. It can't be jamoca almond fudge because I don't have a recipe and Certain People won't eat nuts. And it can't be German chocolate because Certain People won't eat coconut. But counting up the times Certain People had to limit where they ate out because the hypoglycemic vegetarian on the low-sodium diet had to come along, I guess I shouldn't whine about that.

Sometimes I feel like my life is made of interruptions. I start a routine and blammo, it gets sidetracked. I make a plan and wham! Something beyond my control knocks it all to flinders. Which is what happens to most protagonists, too, and is why they can be so annoyingly reluctant to take up their job as protagonists. We pick up a book knowing it's about a quest, or a post-apocalyptic adventure, or a murder investigation; but the character was all set to take the SATs and become a dentist, spend a nice quiet weekend getting on top of the yardwork, or otherwise go quietly about his business. Plots are big inconvenient interruptions to the daily lives of characters. We find it unsympathetic when they bitch and moan and whine about having to save the world, but in a similar situation we'd be much, much worse.

I wish the plots that interrupted my life had more intrinsic interest and eventually resolved; but that's one of the pleasures of literature. We don't get structure or closure much in real life, so we like to experience them in fiction.

I could talk about this for the rest of the morning, and also have thoughts to share about teaching sewing and taking research walks, but that bathroom's not going to clean itself. If I don't post a sale idea tomorrow morning, it'll be because I didn't get the cake baked today and there isn't time to do both before meeting the gaming group.