Winter is coming. Look busy. No, wait, that's someone else.

I overdid it in the heat last night and have been paying since. One of my friends refers to me as a "slightly too-finely-tuned machine," and I'm afraid this is true in some regards. I am not built for heat. I come from those people who raided the coasts of Ireland, mopped their brows, and said, "Oof, it's hot down here in the steamy tropics. Also they seem mad about those nuns. Let's go home." The ones who could stand the heat went off to be soldiers for the Byzantine Empire, and the others waved and smiled and shouted, "Send home silver!" -- and bred up some more little cold-loving babies, which eventually resulted in me.

When we lived in California, sometimes I would have a really excellent time and would enjoy the place we were and the people we were with and the stuff we were doing. But I was always homesick underneath it; underneath it -- and not too far underneath -- was the awareness that I was not where I belonged. I was only a temporary visitor; I was going home soon. I'm like that about summer, too. I'm only a temporary visitor to summer. I can enjoy its tank tops and its long bright evenings and its fresh peas and cherries, but underneath it, I am homesick for winter.

I think maybe one of the reasons I bounced off the George R. R. Martin books is that, "Winter is coming," always seemed like such a cheerful family slogan to me. "Winter is coming! Eeeee! *bounce bounce*"

Anyway, I will try to be more careful in the future with water and shade and so on (I'm already careful with sunblock), and in the meantime I'm somewhat prepared-ish for the driveway work to start today. I have moved the car out of the garage. We got the trees trimmed yesterday where they hung over the driveway.

Anyway. I'm still a little shaky and trying to get on the right side of hydrated, so I think it's one of those days I'll ask you people to tell me something good. With a theme! Tell me one of your favorite things about someone close to you. Parent, partner, friend, child, co-worker, fourth cousin twice removed, whatever. Something nifty about them.

Or, I suppose, something nifty about summer, to help me enjoy my stay here until winter comes back to me. That would be fine, too.

Differences.

This is the first adult novel I've written since Thermionic Night and Copper Mountain (née Sampo) (collectively née The Not The Moose Book, because I thought they were going to be one book, because I was INSANE), and I'm at about 44K on it. It definitely feels like an unfinished book rather than a nebulous storyish thing yet to congeal. There is book here, and it will be written by me, and soon. Yay. Here is the difference between this book and that one, from a writing perspective:

When I was writing the Finnish stuff, I kept having revelations. Something like once a week, I would have a grand revelation that was going to show me the way and make the book amazingly much better and so on. Between revelations, it was extremely slow going.

With this book, I have thoughts about small things that will make the book better and more fun to read. But I rarely have grand revelations, and the words keep happening without them, and in a book-like fashion.

The thing is, the grand revelations really look like they were necessary for the Finnish stuff. I started writing it with no clue what I was doing, not the faintest of clues. I needed to find out. And it worked that way -- it was just harder. Much harder. I'm still dealing with the repercussions of the hardness as I revise Cu Mt. I don't think it was the kind of harder that means it's going to be a far better book than this one is, though. I think it's the kind of harder that means I was a far worse writer then, and that it was a far more difficult book to write even without me improving as a writer. But being more difficult to write does not mean being more interesting to read any more than being easier to write does; they're orthogonal. (At least for me; mileage varying and all that.)

This one has its hard bits, don't get me wrong. It's just that they aren't the kind of hard bits that are amenable to dramatic revelation. It's funny, because in some ways those books had a lot simmering under the surface and only breaking out into the open some of the time, whereas this one has a lot of really overt action. But from the perspective of what they're like to write, it's a much less dramatic book.

This is good. I'd prefer to spend that energy on other things than drama.

(Today I have very little energy at all. Today I am the next thing to useless. Some days are like that.)