Barnstorming on an Invisible Segway

I am home safely.

Until about the time I usually go to bed, I was extremely relaxed about the prospect of tomorrow's chores. Then I got...kinda fidgety. "One more thing...okay, but one more...okay, but one more."

There will be several more things before I go to bed. But small ones, I hope.

Also, Certain Parties are not in my good graces for killing off my favorite characters in their recent novels, and you KNOW WHO YOU ARE, MOLE AND BEAR.

Also, my brain thinks that it may be time to revise What We Did now. Which it is not. It's not even time to do it tomorrow. It may, however, be time to jot little notes about revision in my paper journal. That part's fine. I think.

1. Nuts! Cashews, specifically. They count as actual food, and I had them with my lunch, and this seems like progress. And lunch went better than breakfast did. I'm still skeptical of dinner (grilling out with the visiting relations for Grandma's birthday), but it's Mother and Dad's house, so I can get myself soup or toast or cereal if I find I'm not up to whatever hunks of meat are on the menu.

2. I'm not sure how to convey to the reader of Dwarf's Blood Mead and The Mark of the Sea Serpent that they should just assume all adult males are bearded. I would say "unless the text says otherwise," but the text isn't going to say otherwise: this is not a society that is much for shaving. I could have endless loving descriptions of whose beard is trimmed short and whose is flowy and whose is kind of scruffy, but this is more likely to give the reader the impression that I am obsessed with beards than that they are the standard around those parts. (And heaven forfend that anyone should ever think...well. It's barely less obnoxious than elaborate fixations on other secondary sex characteristics, in literature written for general enjoyment, is what I'm saying.)

Hmm. There are foreigners. Maybe the foreigners -- but the thing is, while I expect that the foreigners would be more clean-shaven at home, they have just crossed a very cold sea in the middle of winter, with lots of men per boat. Even tepid water for shaving is not going to be at a premium, and their faces will be cold. I suspect that many more of them would have beards than would if they were at home.

I think I've done pretty well with Lisved's small slenderness not being particularly generally appealing in this culture while still appealing to Thrand (so that the point is not "skinny people suck" but rather "such standards are not universal"). I hope I have. I hate it when authors get that wrong. (Edith Pattou, I'm looking at you!) But this is more a visualization (and smell and feel) thing than a social point, really.

Hmmm. Revisions, bah.

3. Bad casting can really ruin a movie. I'm not sure that the musical version of "The Producers" would have been good with someone other than Uma Thurman as Ulla (there is still, for example, the matter of Matthew Broderick to contend with, and the matter of Will Ferrell), but the difference between her dancing and Lee Meredith's in the original was just plain depressing. I have liked Uma Thurman in other roles -- "Gattaca," for example, and somewhat in "The Truth About Cats and Dogs." But she was not supposed to be any kind of free spirit in either. The difference in body language plus the plot difference where Ulla suggests that they go to Brazil meant that all of the movie that dealt with her was about a calculated little schemer, not someone who was enjoying herself. Bleh.

I feel like John D. MacDonald on this point, but sometimes Travis McGee is right and exactly choreographed sex appeal is really not the thing.

I do not have a cold.

Convenient, isn't it? Not having a cold. I shall continue for the foreseeable future, not having a cold. Not, not, not, not. No colds here! Would not dream of having a cold! (I wouldn't, actually. My dreams last night seem to have been written by L. Frank Baum, which is its own kind of disturbing but not, you perceive, like a cold in very many ways.)

Sigh. Well, I guess I can keep snarfing cranberries a few days longer. (Cranberries are very scary to germs, you know.)

Also my shoulder is crunchy. I shrug my right shoulder, and it shrugs. I shrug my left shoulder, and it sounds like an elderly car changing gears. It's time for me to go back to the man who sounds like alecaustin or one of his cohorts to get it fixed up again. The shoulder is clearly healing. It's just not healed.

I'm waiting for a call that says my parents' closing went through and they own a house in Apple Valley. The closing was set for 45 minutes ago. I've never actually done one in person, despite our owning this house: we signed the papers remotely and had people here to do it for us, because markgritter wasn't going to be able to be here anyway (he was still working in California when timprov and I had CJ help us drive back -- timprov was still able to drive then, as he may be again someday), so we had to pay a notary in California and FedEx the papers and so on. So I'm not sure how long this should take, if everything is going well.

I finished up the short story revisions earlier, and now I'm poking The Mark of the Sea Serpent and hoping for the best. The notecard that says, "How do they find out about the sneaky dead?" is still staring up at me. I can't put the sneaky dead in with the niflnissen. I can't put it in with Ull and his ring. (I have avoided making Ull look like a California surfer Norse god. This may come with the price of some unintended Buddha associations. I am told that one can't have everything, and when one is trying to send a large blond god over the sea on a piece of bone, this is certainly true, regardless of its general applicability.) I hope the sneaky dead aren't going to be sneaky with me. I'm not one of the Aesir; I don't deserve it.

Two rejections. Two query-responses saying, "Oh, gosh, no, we never got that story." (One of them was particularly snotty, saying that if I hadn't heard back in N days, "clearly" they had never received the story. Oh, clearly. They're the only mag in the world where nothing ever falls behind a desk, gets eaten by the USPS, gets knocked into the recycling bin when it should have gone in the outbox, etc. etc. etc.)

My favorite lj bit of the day came when sosostris2012 addressed her characters: "I'm all, 'Bitch, you could have said that during the last draft.'" Um, yes. Yes indeed. I got notecards, on the theory that I wasn't doing so hot on revisions without them and might as well see if things go better with them.

Also, of course the short story that's been taunting me all week is not the one I'd like to send out for Christmas. Naturally. Couldn't be that convenient.

markgritter's plane gets in tonight; that'll be good. We can maybe get the Christmas tree decorated one of these first years. Every time I've thought about doing it, it's been night and too cold out on the sun porch to be really comfortable for more than a few minutes. It's our auxiliary fridge out there. The tins of Christmas goodies are piling up.

I keep telling myself that I don't have to do everything I can think of doing for Christmas. I am not adding anything at all to the baking list, not deliberately and not accidentally. (The banana bread got added accidentally: we had browning bananas, what was to be done? The portable turtles and the apricot peanut butter fudge got added on purpose because they're easy and seem worth it. It's the same pb fudge as I usually make, because porphyrin's Mike is spoiled, except it's made with the fancy apricot peanut butter, because Mike is really, really spoiled.) It is December 11. No additions to the baking/candy-making list in the two weeks before Christmas. This is now a hard and fast rule.

I am very good at coming up with more stuff to do. It may, in fact, be my main skill.

...to stop revising your book and work on something else when you start addressing yourself as "DUMBASS" in the margins.

Uff da mai.