Bleah

I got discouraging news Monday, and now that I need to be knuckling down to Getting Stuff in the Mail (which I hate to do anyway), I'm grumpy enough that all the recent sales I read about for marketing research sound dreadful, which makes me feel that My Day Has Passed and I Will Never Sell Again in This Market. (I feel this way about once a month, on average.)

But I'm going to get stuff in the mail anyway. As soon as I finish draining the lime out of the water heater and get a load of gentles in.

This is no job for someone who requires external pressure to get things done. Or for someone who isn't willing to use housework as a procrastination tool.

Idea Garage Sale: Speaking Carbon

You know the fairy tale in which one sister's words turn into jewels and one's turn into vermin? Well, in this story, both get forms of carbon. One sister (the crabby one) gets coal; one (the conventionally sweet one) gets diamonds. Both vary in quality with the quality of speech. Lies produce soft brown coal that doesn't burn well and flawed diamonds. However, the coal remains useful, though dirty. The diamonds flood the market and become reduced in value.

Either way, production of the carbon is awkward and unpleasant. The girls (who are twins) resume use of a sign language developed when they were younger. Adult favoritism and sibling rivalry had tended to split them, but under their common misfortune, they gravitate together again. An alchemist can explain to them about the carbon. There's probably some underlying theme with that, but I doubt the alchemist understands about carbon-based life forms.

Do they find a cure, or a way to live with it? Either way, the girls have to stop competing and start cooperating.

The fairy is neutral, rather than good or evil, and the mother figure is selfish and short-sighted rather than wicked.

Their names should mean, but not sound, the same, as Margaret and Pearl, or Rose and Rhoda.

Out of the House, Out of my Head

I drove out to Cibolo Nature Center this morning to take a class preparatory to monitoring a heron rookery. I was a bit late because it's ages since I've been out there and the directions on the website leave something to be desired (it's Business 87 you want), but this should be something I can do and I'm glad I went.

The trouble with getting on top of the house and yard is that the attempt to do so doesn't get me out of the actual house, to which I've been pretty chained since the renovation started. The Sims game was not guiltless, but it was not the whole problem, either. Mere bodily stagnation, surrounded by the same stimuli all day, made the attention ruts hard to get out of. Ironically, by paying attention to herons, it becomes easier to focus on re-organizing the non-fiction.

Jeans may be a harder proposition. The trouble with sewing is, it's not intrinsically interesting to me. I got into it for the practical reason that stores don't stock clothes that fit me. Ever. I believe the last time my figure was fashionable was about 1489; and I'm not talking weight, but weight distribution. Clothes didn't fit when I was a size 10, either. But I'll get to the point I can do it again, now that the brain muscles are getting back into shape for dealing with things outside my own head.

Anyway, a number of questions were asked today by the crowd of volunteers that could not be answered. The data we assemble will be referenced for decades to come by people trying to answer the questions we asked this morning.

This is why volunteers to monitor heron rookeries, and work in archeological sites and labs, and transcribe historical documents, and take species censuses, and sift road cuts for fossils, and track thousands of datapoints in thousands of fields, are needed. Funds are limited. The world is infinite. We don't know - all kinds of things that we ought to know. That would be cool to know. That are vastly important to know, if the last hominid species on earth is going to survive with any kind of quality of life.

And this sort of activity is exactly what we need when we feel stuck in a rut, unable to go forward. Something to shake us up, enable us to be useful, and connect with reality independent of our own habits, egos, and priorities.

I'm not one of those people who goes around volunteering all the time. I generally have an agenda; and sooner or later I'll have to shut myself up in my head again in order to get the next book written (because there's always a next book to be written, even on days when I'm positive I'll never sell another one - that's got nothing to do with whether I write or not). I'm not even a particularly good volunteer when I do it, certainly not the one who becomes the expert in any one thing. But something always needs to be cleaned, hauled, or held, so I'm not often useless, though it's arguable I get more good out of my volunteerism than anybody else.

But I can live with that.

No Dinosaurs in First Grade!

Actually it'd be kindergarten, but First Grade makes a better title, don't you think?

Rita's best friend is a ghost maiasaurus named Daisy, who likes raisins, salad, and Kool-Aid (or some other appropriate diet - we may as well be accurate). She's colorful, with speckles and stripes, and not full-grown, so she'll fit in the house. When Rita starts school she takes Daisy along, but having an invisible dinosaur in class proves too disruptive - she tries to fingerpaint and makes a mess, roars during the singalong, tries to join in the games and work and can't. Soon she has to stay home all day, bored - and Rita isn't always ready to play with her when she gets home, because she has to play with kids from school.

How to resolve this? Unsatisfactory if Daisy just moves on with no destination. Can she meet other dinosaur ghosts? Or get passed on to a baby sister?

I can't really write for kids this young - the voice always comes out too old. Also, I prefer mammalian megafauna. But mammoths don't work here at all.

And yes, I do mean for Daisy to be a real ghost, not an imaginary friend.

On the Necessity of Creating Interdimensional Spatial Access

So, that discipline thing?

Still a work in start-up mode. But the first week is the hardest. One of the reasons I haven't been doing some of this work is that it's hard to find the starting point.

Like, I've finally unloaded the books I wanted to have on hand for writing the lesbian western from the shelf on the computer hutch, making room for my husband to put his geneology and gaming references next to my general references (atlases, dictionaries, field guides, etc.). So, that's good.

But they don't all fit back where they belong. There's now four books sitting on top of the books on the geography shelf, which is a single five- or six-foot board mounted above the filing cabinet and writing desk. There is no more space to put geography books unless we mount another shelf, or clear off the tops of the filing cabinet and writing desk to arrange them there. I was only able to put a couple of the history books back into their proper places - I'm going to have to bring in a ladder and rearrange the entire history wall in order to fit the stuff I was using, and the accumulated new books, on history, archeology, human paleontology, sociology, etc., not to mention the periodicals, onto the history wall. I may have to break out a category and put it - somewhere. And while I was putting up the cookbooks, plant books, and, how-to books downstairs, I found a great big neglected Fortean book, which joins the other Fortean books lying sideways on top of the Forteana-religion-folklore books.

The whole house is like this; and it's a four-bedroom house with ten to twelve foot ceilings and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in more than one of them. The non-fiction must be rearranged and there's not much space to rearrange it to - maybe six feet of shelf space, or less, scattered around the whole house. Some of it in closets; not that I object to shelving books in closets, but we can't get at the exploration and natural disaster books in the mathom* room closet till we decide what to do with the stuff blocking our way to it.

That we will have to add more shelf space somewhere, somehow, is a given, and by the way we need more filing cabinet space, too. But we won't know how much, or where to put it, or precisely what form it should take, until we've done the best we can rearranging what we've got and getting rid of what we can bear to. And then we get to budget their acquisition.

Obviously, what I need here is not just discipline, but access to an inter- or extra-dimensional portal that triples or quadruples my storage space without such troublesome necessities as buying the house next door and using it as a library annex. A bookcase that fits in the space between the filing cabinet and the writing desk, which will store the books we don't use for a long time in some out of the way corner of the universe, with little dust and good preservative qualities, that will respond to voice commands to produce The 1923 Sears-Roebuck Catalog, or books relevant to 15th-century Spanish clothing, or guides to farm machinery, or whatever, without our having to remember precisely the titles, authors, or even whether we actually have such a thing.

What I'm hoping is that I'll make some noticeable progress on the book space problem and then get so hair-tearingly frustrated that cutting out a jeans pattern will seem as blessedly peaceful and easy as putting in a disk or picking up a book, with the added temptation of a prospect of accomplishing something.

*Mathom, for those of you whose Tolkien-derived language skills are rusty, is a hobbit word meaning "something I'm not using right now but am not about to throw away." Our mathom room doubles as our guest room and is the sole repository of things we do have a use for, such as back issues of Fortean Times, Damon's pulp and Sherlock Holmes books, and anthologies; but since the work done on the house it's reaccumulated a lot of mathom stuff. Notably some invaluable SCA references that should probably go on the "history" or "crafts" shelves, had we any room there.

Discipline! Oh, well.

Realizing that I haven't touched the sewing machine, except to dust it, since the beautiful new sewing room became available; that I've let a number of beautiful warm days go by without doing any yardwork; and that only a fraction of the necessary post-construction home reorganization has been accomplished, on January 1 I gave Damon the disk I need to run Sims2 and told him to hide it somewhere until February 1. I can resist the siren call of the game in order to do writing work, hang out with friends, and such important stuff; but it is so much easier to stick the disk in and take Ernest and Sage Ann on vacation, or find out which parent baby Dove Hawkins will grow up to look like, or throw a wedding party for Luis Iana and Sharla Ottomas, than to figure out how to cut jeans so that they'll fit me without letting a draft up my back!

So the first day Damon goes back to work after his vacation that I don't have the disk available is also the first day in awhile that my balance is so bad that pulling weeds, figuring out patterns (which is more of a balance job than you think, let me tell you - I can barely envision flat shapes into 3D ones when my gyroscope's functioning), and bouncing up and down ladders to organize things are strongly contraindicated. And visual effects often accompany the balance ones, making reading difficult, which is one reason I got hooked on the game as a leisure activity to begin with.

Stupid body. You'd think it'd be on my side, but nooooo...

Don't worry - I'll find some way to fill the day. I may even find some way to make it not a complete waste of time. There are organizing jobs I can do sitting down, after all (she says, looking at the stacks on the computer table).

And yes, I will miss my little pixel people and regret the timing on my decision to cut myself off, possibly for several days; but I won't ask Damon for the disk back. Because sometimes we have to do this - to ourselves, and to our characters. Take the crutch away. Remove the resource that lets them work around their problem instead of solving it. Force the character arc because the character is being lazy.

Lazy is our natural state. But busy is more fun.

Idea Garage Sale: The Year in Ghosts

First of all - Merry New Year, y'all.

Second of all: Why aren't there more New Year stories? Is it just that most of us experience it as an extension of the big solstice celebrations? The only New Year story I can think of is Dickens's The Chimes, which is considered one of his "Christmas Books." There's a New Year's chapter in one of the Mary Poppins books in which book characters come out of their books in "the crack" between the first and last strokes of midnight at New Year's. That's it as far as I can think off the top of my had.

Yet there's lots of potential in the New Year. First, as expressed in the Mary Poppins incident, it's a liminal time - a time of transition when the barriers between worlds are thin. Ghosts, UFOs, monsters, fey, angels, demons - they should all be out in force. Second, it's a time we have invested with an arbitrary meaning, a time to start over, make new resolutions (which we don't expect to keep), tackle our lives anew, as if we mean it this time, instead of dealing with it in the half-baked way we've been doing; a time for looking back and forward, self-assessment, and self-improvement. In other words, of interior conflict.

But mostly - New Year's is a dangerous holiday. Drinking, illegal fireworks, celebratory firing of shotguns into the air (but the bullets have to come down) - this is a night when lives are likely to be changed in a literal, and unwelcome, way. Need a character dead, paralyzed, blinded, riddled with guilt? Here's your big chance to have somebody say "Hold my champagne and watch this," or a bullet fall out of the blackness from no apparent source, or a car come careening out of nowhere, and your audience will buy it.

I have a little idea about this. A story cycle - I tried to do this as twelve flash fictions, as an exercise in forcing myself to be brief (you can see how well that worked, huh?) or a novel in 12 chapters. The wife/mother is killed in an accident on New Year's Eve, and she is the viewpoint character. The opening sequence would be her bustling around her house trying to get things in shape after the New Year's celebration, and gradually realizing that she's dead. Each subsequent sequence would show her, and her family's, adjustment to this gross disruption of the natural order. Her husband gets depressed; one kid takes on too much responsibility; one acts out; she tries to intervene, with mixed success. One kid goes to college. One kid becomes obsessed with proving that Mom is (or isn't) still around. The cat can always see her, but doesn't always care.

The trickiest part (apart from my complete failure to write short) is how to give the viewpoint character agency and still let the family go through its stages of grief and finally, on the anniversary of her death on New Year's Eve, reach the point where she can let go of them and they can let go of her. We can't deal with anybody else's grief for them, much as we sometimes want to; and dead people can no longer solve problems.

But that's why the POV character is the mother. Mothers, more than any other class of people, have to perfect the art of influencing their loved ones for their good without dominating or controlling them. Which is pretty much all the ghost can be allowed to do. For this story's purposes, the mother is the ideal protagonist.

I'm not a mother and feel this disqualifies me from doing this sequence as more than an exercise.

Or maybe that's an excuse because I don't want to go through the emotional arc of a mother's death until the world forces it upon me.

Anyway, it's outside my genre. Writing YA and juvenile literature from the POV of a middle-aged woman is problematic at best, pointless at worst.