(no subject)

It may be late, but I'm done. I've also stocktaked.

I have one more payment due to me and then I am through with the earning portion of the year. I have worked furiously this year to get enough money to tide me over till income starts up, and, despite the time for Masques and Conflux and despite the illlness, that's done too. I don't have a lot of money, but I can manage until my next pay, in two months time. I'm very happy about this.

From now for five weeks I'll still be working fulltime (and a bit more than that at various points) but it will be on the things I couldn't do while I was busy getting sick. In word terms, I have 80,000 words to write in five weeks. They're not all the one thing, and I think I can do it, too.

Why am I telling you this? Because three people have told me about the holiday I'm taking and another two have assumed I spent my last few months doing not much of anything at all. Besides, I felt like stocktaking. Knowing that - despite the stove and the water service and the sickness and the peridontal stuff - I earned enough to live on for the dry months is a matter for much joy. So is this 80,000 words. They're not just any words, you see. As I said before (when I was about to head into my stocktake), they're going interesting places. Five thousand of them know exactly where they're going (and some are overdue ... oops) and the rest are my ghost novel.

(no subject)

An old friend just rang. I haven't seen her in years and it turns out we both dropped out of the same circles for the same reasons.

It made me think about the nature of caring. why don't we ring people and find out if they're OK most of the time? Why does some community activity get so very difficult when health problems intervene? Both of us have lost immediate contact with a bunch of friends because - when our lives turned upside down - members of that community cared, but didn't turn the caring into phone calls and found that little things were beyond them. I summed it up as the survival of the community taking precedence over the individuals in the commmunity, but it's more than that. Too many people want their charity to be noted - simply making life easier for someone is not enough. Too many people also want their charity to be convenient.

Anyhow, M and I are back in contact. She's mobile, so she has promised to drop in for coffee. And one of her friends (whom I've helped before) needs some advice and wanted to make sure it was OK. So I'm back in touch with some wonderful folks, and life is good.

(no subject)

Is it wrong of me to correct people who tell me that Santa Claus doesn't exist?

"He does exist," I say. "He's dead, though."

We're still in thunderstorm zone. I've already taken the requisite tablets and coffee (Liz, there was a reason for all that extra coffee last night) and from now am going to take stern measures to stop myself whingeing. I shall write until the storm hits and then I shall read or watch anime for as long as my body allows, and then I shall sleep. I hope the storm waits an hour, because I would love to write for a full hour. I took a couple of hours off this afternoon to run messages, you see, so I have making-up-time to do. I need to make up wiht my novel before it goes into a sulk...

For anyone in this region, the storm won't wait an hour. I'm just wishful thinking.

Things wot I rediscovered in 2008 #2

The thunderstorm is over and my brain has been returned to me. So has my computer.

What I was thinking about while in enforced offline mode was point of view in writing. It was one of the problem areas I encountered again and again in 2008, in the writing of others as well as in my own.

The single most common problem I found this year was movement between the narrator's voice (whether the narrator as omniscient or not) and a character's thoughts. It ought to be simple, that transition, yet writer after writer obscures it and forces the reader to slow down and puzzle through what was actually meant.

One of my favourite blogs just did a really cool post exploring other issues related to this (and also the vexing question of paragraph length, though they have different reasons to mine for not favourite a series of short paragraphs). Definitely worth checking out.