(no subject)

I've already had three small bits of bad news (very small, two of them) and have decided that the rest of the day will be just fine, to make up. If you would all please join me in ensuring this, we should have international peace and love by lunchtime.

(no subject)

Today is a Friday. I know this because Friday is when minor things go wrong. Lots of minor things. Someone is trying to send me a fax over the telephone. I spilled half a litre of soup. One bag of tomatoes was half rotten and the other not in my grocery order. The ants swarming do not hear me when I threaten them with mirrors. Someone doesn't want to publish one of my novels (I wasn't sure about the fit between the publisher and that novel, to be honest - they normally like more action in their other world fantasies and fewer committees - I need a publisher that can handle committees and strong women). I forget the rest. Too many small, idiot things.

The heat has caught up with me and so the fight has gone out of me. I'm cleaning up messes: my floor is soup-free, I will be refunded for the tomatoes and for the 8 bottles of sugary drink I didn't order and can't possibly use, and so on. Of the many things I had to do yesterday and with which life intervened, I did all but five. Of the many things that went awry this morning, all but two are fixed.

I'm taking 2 hours off this afternoon and doing more messages. Then I'm catching up on yesterday. And then the weather will change and things will go right again...

(no subject)

I'm editing SF and watching Blake's 7 all at once (and occasionally making public nuisance, obviously). It's very effective. Blake's 7 is the (formalised) speech pattern of my early adulthood and I rather suspect my earliest SF (mostly lost in a computer accident, some published under a pseudonym) sounded somewhat like it. Everyone speaks in careful phrases, and very intelligently. Dialogue contains lots of details, just so that we don't miss anything and the actors work very hard making their lines distinctive. Since we expect different speech patterns now, I get taken out of the reading and can think about what I'm doing. Also, Blake's 7 was never about the special effects - it was always about turning SF into a stage-production, with tensions and ambiguities and one-liners. Right now, I'm listening to it as a radio play, because my back is to the television - it's a lot of fun. Also, it completely works. (And I remember it, which is quite extraordinary, since I haven't seen it since it first came out, which must have been thirty years ago - whole sentences stick, obviously.)

This is a very specific read-through. It pays to have my mind distracted every few pages. Since this novel has a Big Idea underpinning it and it's not the Big Idea that normally goes with SF time travel to the Middle Ages, I really must get the trajectory of the idea right. There's one character in particular who is shaping the paths of peoples' lives without quite knowing it and so her thinking must be crystal clear and her expressions must be, well, the equivalent of telling detail in the matter of daily lives.

I don't know if this novel is going to be my best work or my worst work, but it's teaching me a bunch of skills.