L’esprit d’escalier

I have a whole bunch of posts floating around in my brain, most of them book geekery. I should be reading for work (and truly, I have read a couple of titles off our spring list that I loved. There’s one that I’ll be demanding everyone I know – especially the gamers – read.)

But, I’m also reading a ton of things that aren’t for work. Soon, I’ll take a picture of the stack of books I intend to read or finish. I think I might work a bit of a contest into it, too, but first things first – let me get the picture taken and uploaded before I start dangling swag in front of you all.

I ended up passing on NaNo this year, though November still has twelve days remaining. I might attempt some made up challenge of my own, to get things flowing. More to come on that as well.

So, who wants pie?

My college campus was a stop on the commuter rail. You’d hear the whistle as the trains came and went, back and forth, shuttling people into the city in the mornings and back out again at night. Sometimes I’d be in class when that whistle would sound, and my mind would drift, wishing I was on my way in to Boston.

The city seemed so exciting to me, maybe because I’m from a small town. Maybe because I remember when I was small, my mother worked here in what we called “the Pregnant Building” for the way the bottom floors bumped up and out, then went back in. Even now, when I have a dream about walking in Boston, I almost always see that building there somewhere.

As I came out of Government Center yesterday, something about the air and the early morning light caught me up and sent me back to that. I can’t define it much more than this: it was one of those days that, if I’d been back in college, I’d absolutely have ditched classes and rode the train into town, like I did a few times back in the day. The air was cool, summer fading towards fall, clear blue sky promising a day that would be warm but not too hot. I wanted to go ramble through bookstores around Harvard Square and have lunch on the plaza in front of Trinity Church.

Instead, I had to keep going, across the street and into work. Stupid grown-up responsibilities.

I’ve worked in Boston for nearly nine years, and I’m not sick of it. The commute gets to me, sure, but that’s because the time I’m physically spending in Boston isn’t spent exploring the city.

One of my several writing projects is a story that takes place (at least at the beginning) in Boston. I’m realizing that when I ran it as a game several years ago, I didn’t really need to know the layout of the streets too accurately – my players were forgiving enough (and some were probably less knowledgeable about the city’s geography than I was.) Now that I’m working towards putting this in front of a larger audience (someday, maybe), that’s an aspect I’d like to make sure I get right.

Fairly early on, there’s a chase that begins in the North End. It’s ultimate destination is Cambridge, but the end of the flight can certainly end well before that. I’d like to try walking the paths the characters will take, or part of it, since I really don’t plan on travelling through sketchy alleys and hopping fences and getting arrested for trespassing. I’ll be bringing the camera along if I do this, so you’ll probably find yourselves on a photographic walking tour/preview sort of thing one of these days.

While I’m at it, might as well toss out a bit of a writing update, too. Anna’s backstory is finally done, which is nice. Took her long enough to tell it. Though, in finishing it, I was reminded of the intrinsic value of a good walk for unravelling plot threads. I was so close to finishing the final scene when it was time to shut down for the day. And, as much as the story was done, the way I was ending it felt too abrupt. So I got up, walked away, and played it out in my head on the way to the train.

I don’t even think I was out of the building before the true ending – the right one – came to me. From there, it was just a matter of spinning out the dialogue and typing it up. The final word count ended up over 17,000 words, 27 pages if I were to print it out. A bit longer than I’d intended, but a few scenes that I hadn’t originally planned demanded to be written, and I think they made the story better.

So, now on to outlining this new-old project (oh god, outlining. /hate). But one thing I’ve learned is, any time I’ve picked it up, I’ve gotten stuck on a particular scene. It’s something that needs to be there, but for whatever reason, I get the characters there and just… stall. In an hour of outlining it, though, I think I might have worked through the problem.

It was also kind of heartening, when I dusted off my old game notes (you don’t want to know the length of that file), I looked at a lot of the stuff I’d forgotten and thought, y’know? This isn’t half-bad.

So, there’s one thing getting a bit of a second wind, plus Lil, who’s rolling her eyes at me from her short story, a revisit of “Kate” sometime soon, and only about a hojillion things I owe other people for Davien, Threnn and Anna.

It’s a good kind of busy.

Today is Tuesday, but it’s Monday-like for me, since I was home sick yesterday.

You see, Sunday, my mother rode in a Dressage show. (I took many pictures. I will unload the camera later and show off the horse who is competing with me for maternal affection.) I showed up at 8:30 AM in a tank top. Yes, I had sunscreen on. I didn’t think the day would get hot as fast as it did, so my only real covering was a wool army surplus shirt, which I figured I’d be wearing for a few hours.

Nope. It was hot as all get-out, and that bad cat came off by 8:45.

So, there I am, running around, taking pictures in the sun for, oh, six hours.

Yeah, I got a wee bit pink. Nay, worse than that. I will go so far as lobster-tastic.

I’ve had worse. Oh, believe me, I’ve had worse.

But! My mom did great, even though her judge was a wee bit harsh. This woman is, as my mom puts it, “Classical.” So if you get something even a little bit wrong, that’s it. No leeway, no sugar-coating.

Still, she took home a ribbon. Fourth place in her group, I believe. And I think she was more shaky than she usually would be. Because, about an hour before her ride, she got thrown.

I didn’t even see it happen – she was riding around like everyone else, warming up. I must have been looking at another horse, or trying to take a picture of someone. I heard a thump in the direction she’d gone, but when I looked, she was standing beside Cisco. I thought she’d just dismounted for some reason.

She came back to where Greg and I were standing and said, “He doesn’t usually do that.”

Me: “Do what?”

Her: “You…didn’t see that?” Cue my mom’s “Oh shit, I shouldn’t have said that” look.

Me: “Nope. What happened?”

Turns out, someone had put up one of those little awning things, made out of blue tarp. The wind caught it just as she rode by, and the flapping made Cisco spook. She thought for a couple of seconds there she was still on – almost righted herself, then he did a little swerve thing and off she went. But she really did bounce right back up, her butt a little grass-stained, her pride a little hurt, but otherwise okay.

Go mom.

So, I ran around in the sun (for some reason, I thought there was more shade there…) and by 2:30, I was ready to go the hell home. I don’t think I realized the sad state of my shoulders until I got in the car and felt the air conditioning come on. I drank enough water to drown a small country, but I still woke up feeling bleh on Monday. I stayed home from work.

So, of course, today is Monday-like for me, and in true Monday form, the train I took into work was running late. So late, in fact, that I didn’t get to work until 9:30. I start at 8:30. At least my boss is cool with commuter troubles. She goes through it herself.

Also, your hostess was thwarted in my quest for lunchtime coffee, since I didn’t have any this morning. It’s raining pretty hard out there, and I have no umbrella.

And a white shirt.

Which means, Starbucks Mocha Frappucino from CVS. Coffee isn’t supposed to be this thick. Stupid Starbucks. Stupid rain. Stupid Tuesday that’s acting like a Monday.

Dear Hill:

I still have it.

(And for the curious, if you can read it off the picture, the website still exists. Warning: the design alone will make your eyes bleed, not to mention the content…)

I was just trying to reserve the username. I have no intention of cat-vacuuming.

Yes, I now have a twitter account. I tell myself it will, if I use it at all, make posts like “QQ I got wet in the rain” shorter, so I can focus more time on either blogging about important things (go on, laugh), or writing.

Yeah. Sure.

Heeeeeere, kitty kitty…

So, like I said, I wandered down to Whole Foods in search of lunch and guacamole. My adventure started off something like…

1) Go outside.
2) Make note of ominous-looking clouds in the direction of the store.
3) Keep walking.
4) Feel a few misty drops at the corner of my building.
5) Keep walking.

By the time I got my food and wended my way through the register lines I realized that the skies had opened the hell up. It’s been raining the last few days, including a hell of a thunderstorm last night – so loud, our house shook with each clap. We had tornado warnings yesterday, too. So, why I thought it would be a great idea to race the storm, I don’t know.

The nice guy at the register gave me an extra bag to hold over my head, then I dodged raindrops all the way back to the office. There are far fewer businesses with awnings between there and here than I realized. At least my hair is dry.

No, really, wet hair can be worse for me than wet clothes. As it is, I got off lightly – the storm let up just a bit as I hurried back. My pants are fairly soaked at the cuffs and my shoulders are damp. My shoes are very, very wet, but I have spare sandals here. I have a sweater, so that should, in theory, keep me from getting chilly in this arctic air conditioning. If I come down with a cold because our building management keeps us frozen, I’ll be annoyed.

My timing could have been worse, though. The rain let up just a bit as I walked back, and when I came inside, a whole department was pressed up against the windows, exclaiming over how hard it was coming down. Seems like I barely beat the next wave of torrential gorramn downpour.

Still. I’m damp and kinda pouty.

It is very, very tempting to hop onto ye olde bandwagon and examine my writing process, as Lori and Deb are doing. I’m fascinated by both, partly because I can see similarities and differences between how they plan their writing and how I do.

I’m tempted to say that mine is planned not-at-all, but that’s not true. It’s just something I do so automatically, I suppose, that I’ve never really considered it a process. I’m awful with outlines. I have character spreadsheets all over the place, and snippets of story scrawled onto whatever paper I can find. (There is a stack of legal pads in my study, whose first several pages are all whatever I was working on when it was within reach. I should take a picture.)

There’s an ATM receipt that’s been in my purse for a year – that, much like my old hard drive – made the trip from one purse to another, actually. It has a snippet of conversation from a scene I’d planned on writing for Threnn nearly a year ago, but never got around to. I still like it, though. Four lines of dialogue, a thought, and a closing sentence, and I want to find somewhere to put them.

Though, my WoW writing has always been like that – scene by scene, not even what I’d necessarily call a short story, since what’s happening is so organic. Other people contribute to plotlines, and one simple line of dialogue from another character can make your carefully planned out story take a completely different turn (this is very rarely a Bad Thing, by the way.)

But the process of writing my other stuff, my I Wanna Get This Published Someday stuff, while it shares some similarities, also has more structure in my approach. I’m thinking that a closer examination of what I’m doing might actually make me progress better.

There are things that both of the ladies are doing that I’m curious to try, now, to see if adapting some of their techniques would work for me.

And of course (she says, resigned that yes, she’s going to pick up her dusty ol’ backpack and take a running leap onto that bandwagon as it comes around the bend), the question becomes, which project do I choose to yatter on about?

Once upon a time, there was a girl.

This girl had a computer. It consisted of some new parts and some hand-me-down parts, and while it wasn’t cutting edge, it did its job well. When some of the parts migrated from the old case to a newer, faster, shinier one, the hard drive went too.

For reasons the girl doesn’t remember, she decided to purchase a new hard drive somewhere along the line. Once, long ago, the concept of filling up her old one seemed preposterous – when would she ever have sixty gigs worth of anything?

Somehow, though, she did, and perhaps it was for this reason that she went and bought a new hard drive. It had quite obviously been a Very Long Time since she’d last purchased one. The new one could fit one hundred and sixty gigs, and she had a hard time imagining she’d ever fill that.

Reflecting on it, though, as she created partitions and named the drives, trying to put some order into the chaos that was her machine, the old drive had to be at least five years old. That’s, like, a million in computer years, and on that ancient drive were all of her various writings – things from games, short stories she’d abandoned, two or three projects that might even become novels… not to mention years’ worth of MP3s, including some rare Counting Crows songs she’d had since college.

The girl made a wise decision, and moved all of her precious information from the old drive to the new.

As time went on, she forgot she’d done it.

Sometime later – maybe a year on, maybe more – the girl came home from a long day at work and turned on her machine. Motherboard splash screen, diagnostic splash screen, operating system splash screen… black.

She pushed the power button – maybe it was a glitch. Same thing.

She went to the wizard that lived in her house, to whom she was conveniently also married, and tried not to whimper as she delivered the news. “It won’t turn on,” she said. She said a few things that sounded vaguely smart, like, “It’s posting,” and “I rebooted!”

The wizard took a look. At first, being a fan of Occam and his Razor, he thought the problem might be dust on the motherboard. Off came the case, out came the vacuum cleaner.

No luck.

He reseated the video card. (The girl couldn’t help thinking that if something had to go, it wasn’t so bad if it was the video card. I mean, really, what better excuse to buy a new one than “my old one broke?”)

No luck.

He took out the memory, to see if the motherboard was even paying attention. The computer screamed, shrilly and frequently, alerting the world to its missing brain. That was a good sign, at least. He put the memory back in.

He unplugged the newer hard drive, the shiny 160 gig master, to see if it even recognized the old drive.

The computer saw it, but it hung, and hung, and hung.

He unplugged the old slave drive and left the master on its own.

It took a while, because something mysterious called a Jumper Setting was left in place, so the master drive was casting about frantically, trying to find the suddenly unresponsive slave drive.

But boot it finally did.

Login screen! Startup sound! Pretty desktop background picture! Gtalk letting the girl know that, even in her (brief) absence from the internet, she had not been forgotten!

And the fear that had crept in, that maybe she’d been lazy and left all of her old stuff on the old drive, the worry she didn’t want to speak out loud for fear of making it true (for, remember, she’d forgotten her long-ago forward thinking), was quickly assuaged. The wizard looked, and lo, there were her stories, and her songs, all safe and sound on the new drive, where they belonged.

Still, no time for distraction.

The wizard shut it all down. Plugged the slave drive back in. Booted up. “Give it time,” he said. “It has to try to find the old drive.” The went down into the dungeon and he showed her the work that had been done during the day. They took their time with the tour, giving the computer a chance to think.

Once the girl went upstairs again, the computer was only just getting around to the log in screen. She sat and tried to look at what might be left on the slave drive, but the old drive had gone silent, now. She shut down, and unplugged it one last time.

Well, the wizard unplugged it. The girl for some reason couldn’t get the cable to come off. He also removed the Jumper, and put the case back on for her.

Another boot – the fastest boot in months and months – and the girl was back in business. Gmail! IRC! Intarwebz!

And they all lived happily ever after.

The end.

—

So, yeah. Let me tell you, it’s no fun to sit there, half sure that you moved all of your important stuff over, and half sure you didn’t, with no way to tell until you can figure out why your machine won’t boot up and then figure out how to get it to actually boot.

It also probably couldn’t have been all that fun to be Greg, with me sitting over his shoulder trying to be helpful. I pretty much know my way around the guts of a computer. I’ve put one together before, and can follow along relatively well when the conversation turns to computer geekery. But when it comes down to “OMFG WHY IS IT BROKEN WTF?” I’m not so great at diagnosing the problem, aside from asking questions that are most likely obvious ones.

But, all is well (for now). Funny thing is, a couple of weeks ago, I noticed what I thought was one of my fans getting awfully loud. I figured it would just be a matter of cracking the case and either cleaning the dust out of the offending fan or replacing it.

Now that I think about it (and considering how quiet my machine was last night), it must have been the old hard drive, whirring its last.

Alas, poor hard drive. Tonight I shall drink something alcoholic in your honor.

I’m a bad blogger.

I’ve been shirking my duties to entertain you lot, but for good reason!

First is work-related. There is a rant coming of epic proportions, and I’m trying to make it less angry-sales-rep-rawr and more constructive-advice-to-booksellers. But it’s tough right now since I’m still in the rawr phase. I’ll probably be in it for another month at least, but I’m hoping to get the post up this week.

Second is writing stuff (yay!). I’ve mentioned before that Annalea’s not terribly forthcoming with me. I have added notes and taken them away from her gdoc, trying desperately to figure out how the pieces of her puzzle fit together. She shuffles some around when I’m not looking, hides others in the cabinets, or under the plants, snatches one from my hand just as I see where it belongs and puts another in its place.

She’s mischievous like that.

I spent a good chunk of last week trying to pry a scene out of her, and finally posted it around 1:00 this morning. It was, I think, one of the hardest I’ve written for her in over a year. I know what happens from there on out, but this was a blank space – I knew the conversation had taken place, and that it hadn’t necessarily ended on an ideal note, but I didn’t know exactly what had been said.

It was awkward for her – Anna’s armor is, quite often, nothing more than her pride. Here she was, going to someone above her station, hat in hand, feeling as low as she ever had. It was hard getting it right for her – her words, her thoughts, her reactions. And the person she spoke with really isn’t the villain here, either (though the villain has made his appearance, now, finally), so it was tough to coax that bumbling chat out of him, too, and finding the line between him being an ass and simply coming from a different kind of mindset.

Of course, now that the scene is finished, Anna’s dangling another puzzle piece in front of me. She seems to have peeked over at the puzzle on her sister’s table and found a piece gathering dust. “I want to borrow him,” she’s saying, and Threnn’s too busy staring at something small and shiny and red to do more than shrug.

This hypothetical conversation between Anna and Robert Bell (a minor character who has appeared briefly several times in Threnn’s stories) came to me almost in its entirety as I was walking to get my coffee this morning. It’s a good one. Actually, it’s a very sweet one. I know I could take that puzzle piece from her, and if I turned it over in my hands, I’d have it done in less time than it’s taken to write this post.

But I don’t think it belongs in the story that I’m writing right now. It doesn’t hurt the tale, really, but I can’t say it quite fits, either. If it was a movie, it would be a deleted scene. I think it’s canon for her, because it’s the second time she’s tried co-opting this minor character that I’ve hitherto associated with Threnn, but I’m not so sure it’ll ever actually be written.

We’re going to argue about this, Anna and I, but I think she can see the other pieces wanting to fall into place, too, and this is a digression neither of us desperately need. The backstory is… nearly done. Two more posts/chapters/installments/whatever-you-call-them, maybe three, and then I’ll see about this other scene. If it’s anything as vivid as it is right this second, it’ll end up somewhere.

I have a folder called “Stuff the Author Knows” on my machine at home. It’s mostly for things I’ve cut out of my longer stories – worldbuilding stuff that I don’t want to forget, scenes that don’t fit anywhere now but might later on, characters who don’t quite belong to the story in which they first appeared. I’m starting to think I need to add one to my gdocs, too.

So, yeah. Bad blogger, no biscuit.

I have some. No, really, it was over there just a second ago…

There is a garden in my backyard. The onions and green beans seem to be casualties, and I have a feeling that once upon a time, there might have been some corn, too, only if it ever existed, all evidence of it has been wiped off the face of the planet.

There are, however, the beginnings of peppers (red, green, and jalapeno), and some promising looking tomato plants. And basil. My basil will take over the world. These things are thriving. I am envisioning tomato, basil and mozzarella salad, fresh from the garden later this summer. I’m not quite brave enough to try making my own mozzarella, but there is at least one really good Italian deli between my office and the train station where I can get some.

The pool is also open. The water is at, oh, 72 degrees. Which you’d think would be plenty warm enough. That’s room temperature, right? I stood there on Saturday, up to my waist, my legs going numb, and had to berate myself before I could dive in all the way (“You fucking wimp. Move.“) Rinse and repeat for Sunday. Once you’re in, though, it’s pretty nice. Now if only we can have some nice weekends this summer – my parents and extended family got more good swimming-time out of it last summer than we did. I’d like to not spend so many Saturdays staring forlornly out the window while it pours and thunders this year, thanks.

Writing: rrrgh. Some. Lori has linked to a shiny new tool on her blog, and I’m mulling over the idea of playing with it, too. Problem is, I’m working on three stories at once (“Four!” insists poor Lil, as the demon that’s been chasing her for several months cackles). All told, the three amount to about 11,000 words and none of them are finished. Threnn’s has maybe one more scene until she’s (mostly) caught up to the present. Anna has two stories going at once – from a year of near-silence to suddenly-won’t-shut-up – and they’re kind of coming out in alternating sections.

Lil’s only about 2,000 words into her run, out of… I’m aiming for 6,000 or less. So, if I do stick a counter up here, I suppose it makes more sense to wait until I go back to Lil.

It doesn’t help that one of my ficlets would like to possibly be something longer, either.