(no subject)

The amount I'm sleeping and my incapacity to do all the things I intend to do are explained: I'm running a fever. The only big task today is editing, so most other things can wait. I shall edit ten pages and rest a bit then have some coffee and edit ten more pages. I'll be finished my reading and note-taking by midnight, which gives me all tomorrow morning to rewrite. Tomorrow afternoon I get to loll around half-naked (for I have an echocardiogram scheduled) and the rest of the week I shall be better for it's all business as usual.

Since it's only a fever and fatigue and some pain (very mild pain) I suspect that it's just life being a bit more interesting than my body can handle. Since is is something I've been suspecting since the vitreous detachment, I'm not unhappy to nap at regular intervals, drink lots of water, eat pomegranates.

What this means, though, is that the postcard decision is going to wait until Wednesday. If anyone feels impelled to add their own explanations of how Canberra is on the coast, you have until Tuesday to do so. And now I have ten more pages to work through and then some resting to do. It's an over-the-top rollercoaster Sunday.

(no subject)

I've started applying for jobs. I don't have much chance of getting them right now (for one thing, the doctorate is not yet submitted) but last time I left applications until quite late in the piece, which meant it took me far longer to actually get the skills together I needed. The best way of developing those skills is by doing, so from now on, when there's a job that I would be happy with (however much a pipe dream) I shall apply for it. I don't actually want a job until the end of this year, and I'm not expecting to actually get one until significantly after that, but if I don't apply then there will be no job, at any stage.

I was thinking about doing a postdoc, but I really want to do teaching, so that limits my postdoc options.

Right now I'm struggling with my CV. It's bizarre. Not the struggle, but my work history. I have some rather interesting work experience. Stuff like education policy at the national level and giving in-service training to the guides at the Jewish Museum in Melbourne. I forget these things about myself. I may not be terribly employable, but at least I will give a selection committee much entertainment and will be very exotic.

I am more unwell than before but have reached the stage where I really don't care.

Life as research

I've been thinking about characterisation today. This is because I've spent the whole day editing. Only 15 more pages and I can go to sleep, but those fifteen pages and the choices made by Lost (and my own real-world observations) have made me pause a little.

It's really hard to write someone who will voluntarily hurt other people in constant small ways and feel a rush of personal gratification from it. And yet, these people are real. I have known them in committees past (very past!) - they watch through meeting after meeting for evidence and then pounce on someone, disregarding every single skerrick of material that doesn't fit their predetermined view and then act on their intended misperceptions, with unerring nastiness. I have trouble writing such a character into fiction. I once mixed with them, but I cannot write them comfortably. It's odd and curious.

A little while ago, I was talking about these situations from my many-years-ago with a friend who was there, watching the same people. It ought to be awesome from a writer's point of view, knowing why that eminent person looks so very sour despite success, but it really isn't. I haven't managed to put even an aspect of one of these people into my fiction so far.

I needed one of them for this novel, but created someone else. Someone more precious but less vindictive. Someone who didn't bother to watch what the other person did in search of bits and pieces that could be woven into a fabric of hurt. And yet, such a person would be a totally wonderful character in a novel. Easy to dislike. Full of behaviours that got the reader's emotions sympathetic to their victim. Destructive in useful ways.

I think the problem is that I know I'm only seeing the picture of these unfriends as it related to me when I was an undergraduate. What they tried to do to me was so much a failure that a group of us still laugh about it, thirty years on.

These people would make such a good basis for a petty villain. And yet, I can't write them into a novel, for I never knew them well enough. I'm not going to hunt them out to say 'hi' but I might find out what they're doing with their lives, through the grapevine. I know their faces show who they are more clearly than many years ago (as faces do*) but that's not enough. I want to know if they had to change their behaviour to create decent adult lives or if they're reaping rewards (positive or negative) for what they did. It may be that they were exploring their youth and grew up to be solid humane pillars of the community, in fact, which would be awesome in terms of fiction.

Not that this solves the lack of continuity in a section of my time travel novel, which is why I'm stopping for breath. The realisation I'd shifted my character from its original concept was just a small part of me stopping for breath.

One day, though, a character will appear in a novel and it will have been inspired by certain actions of people I knew way back then. This is the closest I shall ever come to admitting it though, for they were (back then) precisely the kind of person who would watch for it and would be angry about it. That's why they would make such a valuable character. Just one of them. Distilled from all those kinds of people I knew when I mixed in those absurd circles.

One thing I love about the committees I've been on since I came to Canberra**, is that this sort of person just doesn't appear. One of them hosted a meeting I was at, once***, and we all snarked the moment he was out of the room. I suspect this is a combination of my age, the amazing people I mix with and the fact that Canberra pretends it's a country town but really is rather sophisticated.



*I don't know what my face shows about me. I don't know if I ought to want to know, even. My waistline apparently makes me huggable, but that's something quite different.

**Which means this post was probably brought to you by the consultation on racism happening this Thursday. It all started with committees in Melbourne when I was an undergrad, you see. The folks I will be with on Thursday are at the other end of the spectrum.

***I won't blog about this, but buy me a drink at a con and I have been known to talk about him and that meeting at vast length. For he forgot to make sure I signed the same secrecy form that the others all signed and so I was not sworn to silence. Mind you, even he is someone who has people who will say "He's a good human being - I've met him socially."