Barnstorming on an Invisible Segway

buymeaclue tagged me, so I guess I'm listing eight random things about myself. If you want to do like this, please do, but I don't tend to tag people for memes, even though I don't mind being tagged myself.

1. Eight is my favorite number. First cube! Well, first cube that isn't one. Or zero, I suppose. I am also fond of 27, in theory. As a number. In practice, well...I won't be sorry to see what 28 is like, come July, let's say that much.

2. In retrospect, the worst year of my childhood was the year I was 9, and the best year was the year I was 12. I define "childhood" as "period before I left for college" for this particular purpose. Different subjects of discussion require different definitions -- I was startled, when talking to a 15-year-old at Minicon, to hear her refer to herself in a conversation about what kids are reading. I said, "What? No, no, in literary terms you're a grown-up." This is not universally true, I suppose, but the odds seem good. Anyway, 12 may vary a lot, but I think 9 is hard across the board. You're no longer a cute little kid in the same way as you were before, but people only want to treat you as a "big kid" when it's something that's convenient for them, never when it's convenient for you.

3. I hate shoes. My feet are very bad at keeping callouses (so I also hate going barefoot), so it's always more of a process of breaking my feet in than breaking my shoes in. Stupid shoes. I am theoretically very easy to fit in shoes, not to one end or another of length or width. American women's 7.5 regular. Easy, sort of. Except for the part where my feet bleed. Boots, boots are the answer.

4. I love to feed people. Mostly I love to cook for people, but it does go beyond that: when some of my younger friends didn't really much care for the soup I'd made, they were thrilled to be offered peanut butter sandwiches, and I was thrilled to be able to get them something they wanted. (I'm not always as keen on people getting into my pantry/fridge and utterly ransacking it without consulting me or without listening to what I said -- sometimes I had plans for that stuff! -- but that's not as much an issue as once it was.)

5. Related thereto -- and I thought everybody who knew me already knew this, but then someone I consider a dear friend had not made the connection -- I don't actually enjoy eating all that much. I enjoy baking, and cooking, and smelling food. But putting it in my mouth and chewing and swallowing? Meh. I get resentful of people who say "never trust a skinny cook." I have smelled the dish in great detail before I serve it to you, and probably have tasted it in multiple stages, but the kinds of tastes I get before I serve people food are not meals in themselves. Not even close. I don't need bigger pants to smell well.

6. I don't really mean to accrete people. It just happens. I used to mean it a lot more, because I used to think that if I didn't make superheroic efforts, people would just evaporate. Now I trust you-all a good deal more than that. Well, okay, not you-all. But at least you-some. I am often surprised at what kind of people I have gotten handed sort of matter-of-factly by the universe. "Thought you might want someone to Noel Streatfeild geek with." "Uh...okay. Thanks, universe." Etc.

7. I have periods when short stories are attempting to cascade out of me and are getting a big bruised in the crush. Right now is one of those times -- or rather, it feels like the beginning of one. I haven't had one for awhile, so this is probably okay.

8. I don't have nearly so many short stories that are quiet, subtle, decorous ways of yelling at one specific person any more. Most of the people who were going to be able to hear that have already had their stories written, and most of the rest probably won't be able to hear it. I do get obscurely wistful in stories that are not themselves wistful at all. They are outlets for my wist, in tiny pieces, sometimes. Not always. The more I go along, the more the stories are self-sustaining and self-defining, and the less they're object lessons or target practice. This seems like a fine thing to me.

I'm supposed to be taking time off this week. Time off, time off. Yes. Vacation.

This is a very simple theory. The practice of it is a lot less straightforward. What counts as work? What doesn't count? We've established, I think, that I'm allowed to cook if I'm having at least a bit of fun with it but am not required to cook if it's a horrible chore. I'm allowed to noodle around in my paper journal but not to sit down and draft stories or revise Thermionic Night or type revisions or even deliberately plot stuff. Where the line is there, I couldn't really say, though, when noodling becomes drafting or plotting or whatever. Reading random nonfiction and jotting down ideas is probably fine, but I have not yet made a ruling on reading immediately relevant works. I've been sticking to fiction to be safe, and also because I'm enjoying just having some lazy reading time.

When we talked about having me take some time off, timprov was concerned that I would take this to mean it was catch-up time on non-writing related projects and activities and would promptly overschedule myself in different directions than usual, but still overschedule. So I've deliberately not been doing that. I'm having my by-now-normal lunches with Ceej and dd_b, but other than that, we are playing it mostly by ear. I am playing it mostly by ear, I mean. It's a weird feeling for me, to start to think, "Okay, I'll finish reading Camouflage, and then I'll get in the shower, and then..." and have to stop there, because all of my "and thens" are related to writing. I think it's good for me. Still, I'll be glad to get back to work, too.

Camouflage, by the way, the latest Joe Haldeman, was well-done but not likely to make it into the ranks of my favorite books or even my favorite Haldemans. It was one of those "spark missing" books for me. I'm now reading The Autumn Castle by Kim Wilkins, and I'm with porphyrin and dlandon: I have no idea why they compare it to Neil Gaiman and Anne Rice on the cover copy. Strange thing, that. But it's very good, has me engrossed, not quite standard fairies, etc. The major shocking revelation so far didn't really touch me the way it touched one of the characters, but I believed that it touched her, so that really is what mattered. And now, back to it, I guess.