Bits and pieces of my day

[mrissa]

1. Medical personnel should understand that the 12-month calendar year consists of not 12 but 13 lunar months -- that is to say, roughly 13 28-day months. So if you write a prescription for something, some mysterious thing, on a 28-day cycle, and you want the person to come in for some mysterious routine exam one year later, you need to prescribe 13 packets of this mysterious thing, not 12. Counting through the calendar months with me to come up with 12 will not change the fact that I need another month of birth control before my insurance will pay for another routine pelvic exam. And anyway once a year is often enough and I don't want to have them more than that for no good reason. I have now had to explain this to three different doctor's offices. I'm afraid I got rather sharp with the triage nurse on the phone, but if I'm the only patient having this problem, the other patients are non-compliant on this medication.

YARG.

2. My backup red pen was too light for my satisfaction (anyone local who wants it may have it next I see you), so I am now revising Sampo in brilliant pink. Things have gone substantially downhill since the first promising twelve pages, but not in a frightening way. In a baffling way, in fact: my reaction is not, "I shouldn't have done it that way" but "it didn't happen that way." I found this with Thermionic Night revisions, too. My reaction feels as factual as if someone was recounting something for which I was present and got a small fact wrong -- no dear, that was Saturday, not Sunday sort of thing. Some of the things I've noted this way are fairly major plot points. Others are minor details. It feels odd in either case. Not bad -- good, in fact, that the fixes seem so immediately accessible, so obvious -- but certainly disconcerting. Why would you have said that about Edward? You know it's not true. Yes, all right, brain.

3. I'm reading karentraviss's Crossing the Line now. Just started it. It took me less than the first page to get my brain back into the right mode, which is probably a good sign.

4. I have other things to say -- about being female and feeling safe or not, about why scalzi is cooler than Michael Crichton (well, a subset of why -- lj will not hold the whole of why), about heroism both genuine and fantastic, about which things seem to always take place in between the stories I actually write and how I feel about that. But I have other things to do before bed, so that stuff will have to wait with this placeholder to remind me.

Oh, and I wrote a bit about skalds and quantum mechanics in the Thermionic Night universe, the sort of writing where the hand goes on writing and the brain keeps going, "Really? Interesting. I didn't know that." I have complained about Mary Gentle's White Crow stories that the more she writes, the more untold stories I feel there are about these characters. I fear that writing these books has not given me fewer stories in this universe. Sigh. Also I have notes in the margin of Sampo that will become short stories, and notes in the margin that will apply to Thermionic Night revisions (I knew there was a good reason to do this now!) and notes that will apply to drafting The Winter Wars. I am still telling myself that I do not have to draft The Winter Wars or Midnight Sun Rising at this time, much less both simultaneously. I am not sure how convincing I am yet, so we'll see whether I believe me or not.

Comments

[porphyrin.livejournal.com]

The problem, at least as I've found it in prescribing contraceptive therapy, is that when you write a prescription with 12 refills, the insurance sometimes doesn't cover the 12th refill.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

And what do you do then? Will the insurance usually cover it if you write a new prescription for the same stuff, or does it just have to come out of the patient's pocket?

And the thing is: you're not surprised that 13 little packets are needed. You are not sitting here arguing with me saying, "But there are twelve months! Look, if you start in September, that's 1, October 2, November 3...." Which the idiot nurse did.

[azhure.livejournal.com]

My reaction feels as factual as if someone was recounting something for which I was present and got a small fact wrong -- no dear, that was Saturday, not Sunday sort of thing.

I get that a lot with revisions. Damn characters taking over their stories.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

For me it's less like that on first draft and then less like that again on later revisions. It's just this one stage that feels that way, which makes it weirder.

[aquaeri.livejournal.com]

At least the medical insurance here isn't draconian about having to wait a calendar year before coming back, but yes, I am at a total loss about the whole 12 * 28 days, and the way no-one seems to have noticed that's not a year.

(Oh, and because I'm that kind of nitpicker: 28 days isn't even a lunar month, full moon -> full moon is about 29.5 days.)