Not Patient

[mrissa]

Or at least, I'm not very good at being (a) patient.


I miss food. With, you know, varied texture. I miss conversation on the order of more than two whispered sentences. I miss physical activity that takes more than five minutes and the tiniest bit of energy. Hell, I miss being able to be vertical all afternoon without coughing constantly and getting all worn out and having to go lie down again.

I am very, very sick of lying down. My body, however, has not vanquished this stupid virus, and it seems to be using energy for that purpose rather than for bouncing around happily doing stuff. Go figure.

What I really want right now? I want to go out for lunch and sit and eat food that's hard to swallow, and I want to talk over lunch to someone interesting, someone I already like, preferably someone who doesn't live in this house or dine here most nights. I want to be able to drive myself there and I want to sing songs in the car on the way back. Does this sound unreasonable? It does not. It's not such a big dream.

Also, I want spammers never ever to use "Editor" as their "from:" line, because then if I'm writing another e-mail, I get a little notice at the bottom of my pine window: "New mail from Editor!" Bastards.

Also, I want Orson Scott Card to stop writing sucky books in a series that started well, and I want people to stop buying books like The DaVinci Code. Because honestly, I couldn't stomach any of it past the prolog. I wouldn't have tried if Mark's grandma hadn't lent it to me. But I didn't expect it to be that bad.



But I've read a fair bit, and some of it has been good -- The Harp of the Grey Rose broke my "annoyed with Charles de Lint" streak, and now I have Will Shetterly's Chimera sitting on my desk at the ready, and did you know Lin Carter was a man? I didn't know that. All my male cousins with names that sound like that spell them Lynn, I think. You probably all knew, but I just go around assuming people are, you know, women and stuff. I don't know why. Probably because many of them are.

Also I'm almost done with this Kalevala bit and can soon get back to blood and politics, though more of the latter than the former, in Sampo. Even though I have to get through Lemminkainen first, and Lemminkainen is the very worst of the Kalevala if you ask me. Which nobody did, but honestly, "Oh, you went and visited your friends and I didn't want you to, and now I'm going to tie you up at someone else's farm and go kill things until someone else agrees to give me their daughter instead?" Bloody Lemminkainen. Spoils everything. I mean, Ilmarinen is at least some kind of proto-geek, yah? And in all likelihood had a beard, so there you have that.

And there are a few e-mails, including an unexpectedly complimentary one -- not that I expected this particular correspondent to be actively uncomplimentary, mind, but nor do I expect extravagant compliments out of the blue via e-mail -- although if you have any extravagant compliments, I suppose that's as good a delivery method as any and better than most just now. ANYway, there are some e-mail to sub in for conversation until I'm better able. Which means that some poor people have heard more from me than they'd probably need to, but hey, at least I'm happy.

And I really do like soup. I'm now having to remind myself of that. But I do. Soup is nice. Ice cream is nice. Applesauce is...um...nice-ish. Definitely nice-ish. Yes. Oatmeal: also nice.

And I can have hugs when I need them. Which I do. But then I have them. So it's a good thing. Doesn't even hurt the throat or wear me out. Yay, hugs, long, hair-and-back-petting snuggledy hugs.

Comments

[gwyneira.livejournal.com]

Would the Card be the Alvin Maker series? I read The Crystal City a couple of months ago and was disappointed - I was hoping that the suckiness of Heartfire was just a freak occurrence, but The Crystal City wasn't very good either.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Indeedy. I quit The Crystal City a few chapters in, when the suckiness appeared to be continuing unabated. I loved Seventh Son, but maybe 60 pages into The Crystal City, I thought, "He's going to keep writing them, but I don't have to keep reading them." So I put it back on the pile to go back to the library. Steady decline, blech.

[merriehaskell.livejournal.com]

I want Orson Scott Card to stop writing sucky books in a series that started well.

I wish that too. I never made it halfway to Crystal City. Or past Xenocide.

[cooperati.livejournal.com]

i was sure it was the ender series. i read ender's game, and that was fine, innovative, structured, but speaker of the dead half blew chunks, and xenocide blew the other half, and snorted besides.

though, i just saw shadow of the hegemon on the book shelf. i'm thinking about buying a copy for me and my friend. though he lives in georgia, he and i can light it on fire simultaneously. it will very much prove to suck as bad, i expect.

-=T=-

[timprov.livejournal.com]

Shadow of the Hegemon was actually pretty decent, in a thinly-veiled-retelling-of-a-Civ-game kind of way. Not that I've rushed to read the next one.

[cooperati.livejournal.com]

i'm glad to hear that. only a few things are redeaming about card, and this book in particular. it's a new hardback at the dollar store, and it's been long enough for the sting of the first two sequals to have done down.

they also had two sequals to the blair witch files i'm going to pick up. so it's going to be a worthwhile haul.

thanks.

-=T=-

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I know you're joking, but this is at least the second time you've talked about burning books on my journal, and I'd really like you to stop.

[cooperati.livejournal.com]

is it really (at least the 2nd time)? i didn't realize it. sorry about that. it's your journal, and i'm happy to oblige.

i really can't recall mentioning it in the last 15 years.

-=T=-

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Did I say that? Where did I say that? It's nifty -- and I miss having hummingbird energy. Sigh.

[blzblack.livejournal.com]

Yes, get well already--but then, even sick, you have the writerly vigor of 100 meager Trents.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Because my heart is pure?

(Pure what, we will leave as an exercise for the reader.)

[blzblack.livejournal.com]

There may be something to that.

[pameladean]

In Making Book, Teresa opines, "Being sick is boring. Boring, boring, boring." Since she's talking about chronic illness, she goes on to say that from time to time it becomes scary and then it gets boring again; but I've found the boring bit to pretty much sum up anything that takes longer than three days to resolve.

Pamela

[flewellyn.livejournal.com]

Not a big fan of Card in any case. I never could feel sympathy for his characters, except for Ender, and for him I could never get a grasp on motivation.

As for the Davinci Code, I haven't read it. Heard good things from some friends, though. What is it you disliked?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

The writing. It was a primer for how not to construct sentences in a narrative. Some folks in the genre have a list called the Turkey City Lexicon that gives one terminology for common writing problems. There were at least four Turkey City problems in the first couple of paragraphs.

[seagrit.livejournal.com]

This is interesting, because I finished the DaVinci Code in one afternoon and enjoyed it. I can't say I would necessarily notice bad sentence/paragraph structure (?) unless it was really bad, like grammatically wrong. Now THAT would annoy me. But do you suppose this is something you notice because you know what to look for, as a writer, or did you always read this way?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I think I was always more sensitive than usual to this sort of thing (but putting a date on when I started being "a writer" would be hard), but I'm much more sensitive to it than I used to be.

Things like "said bookisms," where nobody can say anything, they have to "opine" and "aver" and "declaim" all the time, combined with Tom Swifties, will make a dialog-heavy passage painful for me. And it's not that I never make these mistakes myself -- it's that I catch them in the edits, for heaven's sake.

Maybe it's like a dog whistle. I certainly want to put my paws over my ears and howl.

[flewellyn.livejournal.com]

I find that alternative words for "say" are like spice: a little adds flavor, but too much makes your tongue burn. Er, literarily.

Turkey City lexicon, eh? I'll have to look that up. You're just a huge collection of nifty resources! :-)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yes, I am a veritable fountain of bullsh--uh, useful information.