Barnstorming on an Invisible Segway

Today I gave up on a thing I was trying to make the vertigo go away or be easier to deal with. It did not do that. It had been two months of trying. It was making me tired and taking up time and money and had no discernible positive effect. So I quit.

I am not at all thrilled that this didn't work. But it didn't. So we're dealing with that.

I'm perfectly happy to talk to people, but not so much publicly on this one. My gmail account is marissalingen, if you feel like talking about this or something else. It doesn't even have to be something more cheerful.

I will start out by saying I had a really good time at World Fantasy. I start here because I don't want it to be obscured: I had a really good time. I have good friends, I work with good editors, and my friends have interesting friends and acquaintances. So I had a really good time at World Fantasy.

You knew there was a "but" coming, right?

But. One of the things it did is highlight that I am doing worse than I was earlier this year. If I'm honestly with myself--and you--I will say it's kind of a lot worse. There were four nights of convention, and in three out of the four of them I had such a severe energy crash in the evening that I had to go back to my room and get under the covers and stay there. This happened by 9:00 p.m.; after that, I was completely done for the day. I had to use my cane all day on Sunday. I haven't had to use my cane all day in awhile.

I am so very exhausted. I have been doing stuff to try to get to feeling better, and so far that stuff has not resulted in me feeling better but has resulted in the use of time, money, and energy. In kind of large quantities, in fact.

One of the results of this is that I came home from a major convention and trimmed my friendslist instead of adding to it. I feel bad about this, because I don't actually feel differently about those of you I've removed. None of you screwed up. But I'm having to cut to bone here. I'm doing things like putting a ban on baking until after Thanksgiving. That should tell those of you who have been around and know me how low I am feeling on time and energy. No one has offended or upset me recently; that's not what this is about. It's about trying to carve out some space to breathe. It's about trying to be sensible and rest a bit instead of making myself ill and then having to rest.

It's not going to be enough. I know that. But I'm doing what I can here.

More about WFC when I can. I'm going to go rest and then have the workout I need to have in order to be able to get dinner in me.

I have put another library book into the return pile without reading it, and there were several reasons. (Oh, several.) But there's a particular prose tic I've seen from underedited works before, and I wanted to speak out against it:

"That was the word for it."

If you are ever, in authorial voice, using this phrase, stop and eliminate it. You are the author. You don't have to tell us that was the word for it. We only have your words for it. If you say that the love interest was brooding (please, for the love of Pete, do not say that the love interest is brooding), then following it up with some self-soothing is not the thing. "He was brooding. That was the word for it." No. Stop. Simply do not.

See also: "There was no other way to describe it." You are the author. We have to accept your descriptions (or reject the book entirely, which is, as you see, always an option). So if you say, "Her room was a mess. There was no other way to describe it," well, I immediately think of other ways to describe it. There are lots, actually. There are hardly any things in this universe with only one way to describe them. Even lone electrons have both position and momentum, not to mention charge and mass and like that. They can be described in many ways. So can your characters. Telling me there was no other way to describe it will simply make me wonder why you need to reassure yourself so.

Even in character voice, this should be used sparingly--but the character, at least, has some excuse to be a wibbling doofus. You do not.

So hi. I haven't been posting much lately because I have either a) been doing other things or b) been collapsing after the doing of other things. And sometimes we get too much into "Let me esplain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up," mode around here. So here I am, summing up. ( state of the Mris, including concerts and vertigo report and who knows what else I'll get to )

Right now what I am learning is to be quiet and trust the book. I pick up the next bit tentatively, and it comes, and it makes more sense than I knew it would, so I just breathe and remember to take regular breaks to roll my shoulders and flex my hands, and I hope for the best.

And as The Mark of the Sea Serpent grows slowly, I find that I know things without thinking of making them up: that frost giants don't like iron but aren't as averse to it as alfar. That they like alder wood much, much less than alfar or humans, so that even Hraesvelg of the Winds doesn't use any alder at all, not on his whole island. That wolf-brothers get seasick more than anyone else. That the time to deal with alfar is not summer, as you would think, but winter, because in winter they are focused on more of the things you are focused on, so you can come to some sorts of agreement without having to rely on force and bindings. (There are almost no alfar in this book, just one in a river. But I find myself knowing these things anyway, in the same matter-of-fact way Soldrun knows them.)

My energy is still well below my average; I'm still running out of steam sooner and more often than before this year, in the afternoons and evenings. My sense of smell is acting up again, and my sinuses are pretty clearly misbehaving, and I'm not sure where all this goes from here, except that I go to the ENT a week from tomorrow. But the book goes on, and I would much rather have all this stuff with a book that's going than with a book that's digging its heels in. I am trying to be content with doing what I can. We'll see.

(Still not king auntie.)

[insert tired whine here]

Other than that, I'm having a pretty productive day, getting things removed from the list at quite a reasonable rate and doing other, non-list things besides. I have finally got my hands on a copy of Lloyd Alexander's The Xanadu Adventure! This is the last of the Vesper Holly series, and I have wanted it since I was 11. It hasn't existed that long, but I've wanted another Vesper Holly book that long. The Chronicles of Prydain and the Westmark trilogy were both definitively ended with their last book, and much though I love Westmark, another book in Westmark would have to be the start of a new plot arc completely; The Beggar Queen is the last. But The Philadelphia Adventure, while theoretically conclusive enough, left the possibility for more, and so more I wanted. And now I have more.

The other book I'd wanted since I was 11 was published long ago (Arthur Ransome's Great Northern?, the last in the Swallows and Amazons books).

What about you? What books have you wanted forever? Or did it just seem like forever? Were they everything you wanted of them? What are you still waiting for?

(Now nobody say Going North, no matter how much we all want it, or pameladean will turn pink and get flustered. Which heaven forfend.)

It is time for the people I love to stop having shitty stuff happen to them for just a little while. No health problems, no family arguments, no romantic entanglements gone all knotted, no school struggles, no work idiocies, no artistic woes, no deeply difficult decisions, no political evils, no technology wonkiness, no home repairs, no car accidents, no missing loved ones, no feeling helpless, no long stupid meetings, no losing their keys, no back spasms, no toe stubbing, no running out of milk halfway over a bowl of cereal, no oranges gone bad in the bottom of the kid's backpack. Just no more, okay universe? Just for a little bit.

Now watch: everybody I love will have an absolutely stellar quarter of an hour between 3:30 and 3:45 a.m., their local time, and most of them will be asleep, and the ones who are awake will not have reason to notice that they played three perfect games of solitaire, their ice water didn't taste of rust, and the printer didn't jam.

I'm so tired. Almost everyone I know is so tired, too. On the up side, I have more good people to love and worry about than any one woman could expect. That really does count for something.

I'm on lj to stay awake again, this time until about 9:00 p.m. I slept for three hours after we got home, got up and drank some water and posted the last entry here, then went back to bed for two more hours. We went out for Mexican for dinner and watched a B5, and now I'm clinging to wakefulness with my fingernails.

There were several things I didn't end up doing last night because I was not very steady on my feet by the time I thought I didn't need to "save" them any more. The down side to this is that now we have an exhausted Mris and bathrooms that still need cleaning, etc. The up side is that I didn't have to try to keep my balance when I was tired enough to be dizzy. Which I am again/still.

Whoever told me not to plan anything for the next 24 hours was not kidding. Focusing my eyes is a lot of work right now. I may not make 9:00. Already I'm talking myself into 8:30 being okay.

So. Here I am, still awake. One of you asked where I find markets, and the short answer is Ralan. I also hear from people on the friendslist etc., and I sometimes use other lists. But mostly Ralan.

And one of you said she wanted to hear about books, so here you go: I like books. I even know some, personally. Do you have more Arlo Guthrie moments when you're tired? I know I do.

Also one of you wanted a post brought to you by the letter T and the number 3. I forget how that used to work, though. Am I supposed to think of things with a T sound? I don't remember what T is for. I don't think it's for trums. How about blankeT, resT, and Tired? Those are three things with a T sound.

Someone else asked what books I didn't like in 2005 and why. The ones I'd be able to write about are not the ones I really didn't like, because I just put down the ones I really didn't like. Mostly this was because the writing was so bad it made me screech. I don't insist on golden, deathless prose in every line of every book, but there are some tics that annoy me much more than they used to in a work of published fiction. I think happy and unhappy books are the opposite of happy and unhappy families -- well, it's more that I think Tolstoy was wrong about happy and unhappy families. But good books make me squeal in all different directions -- this one has an excellent father-daughter relationship, that one messes with genetics implications, the other destroys the Stanley Cup because what is wrong with you people? Ahem. Anyway, the books I really didn't like are mostly dull or banal or poorly written or all of the above. A few were overwrought instead, or poorly thought-through. The books I didn't love are a much more interesting category than the books I didn't like.

Someone asked about boots. Boooots! I am usually a hiking boot girl, and not only that but a hiking boot evangelist. For awhile I thought I was in pretty bad shape. Two miles into a hike, I would be ready to go home and flop on the couch. Then I got new boots, and the four mile up-and-down-hill trail that had kicked my butt the previous week was a pleasant walk. Moral of the story: if you're getting a fair amount of exercise otherwise and don't have any medical conditions that you know would affect it, see if you have good footwear, because it really, really matters.

My new boots are not that kind of boots at all. I'd be begging for mercy in much less than two miles in my new boots. (That may not be true when they're broken in, but I expect that to be somewhere around 2010.) But they are girl boots, and they are not weak girl boots, and they are not dominatrix boots. They are just strong girl boots. I looked at some that would have completed any "Viking merchant princess whose family trades with Muscovy" ensemble I chose to wear -- and frankly I bet I could pull that off -- but it isn't, shall we say, the goal of most of my outfits.

You may wear stilettos if you like, but I will not, not even in boots.

There are more things on my suggestion list, some of them incredibly thoughtful, others silly and fun. I will probably get to them because they interest me. I'm not sure I will get to them yet today. Whichever day that is. I'm going to go downstairs and work out. Then I will drink water and some cranberry juice. Then I will have a shower. Then Mark will wake up. Then we will go to the clinic. Then I will have my test. Then we will come home. Then I will sleep. Then I will relearn how to structure sentences more than one way. Okay? Okay.