Sunday, March 17, 2024

Before the dawn

Nasal polyps. Growths that form in the nasal cavities and as they grow, progressively block them. This means stuffy nose, stuffy head, post-nasal drip, sinus headaches. It also basically lowers the threshold of various histamine-type reactions, meaning it frequently leads to asthma and even to what is called NSAIDS Syndrome; a nasty allergic reaction to a whole family of anti-inflammatory drugs like aspirin.

(More technically, one of several similar problems rooted in a disregulation of several metabolic pathways. Named Samter's Triad when first discovered, the specific strong brochiorestriction reaction following intake of non-steroidal (corticosteroid) anti-inflammatory medications is given the lovely acronym NERD -- NSAIDs-exacerbated respiratory disease or aspirin-exacerbated... Anyhow, about .7 percent of population but upwards of 22% of long-term asthma sufferers.)

And all of this can cause sleep apnea, meaning drowsiness, lack of concentration, and once again, increased susceptibility to infection.

All of this is my excuse for why I didn't figure it out. Too many different symptoms pointing every which way. And Kaiser, like all HMOs, is very compartmentalized. Having a family doctor who is familiar with your history and trained as a GP doesn't come across as cost-effective in their books. So they have specialists. Very good specialists, but also overworked specialists. Making efficient use of them pushes the system towards targeting a specific complaint and focusing in on that.

I call it the Kragen's Auto Parts of health care. "Hi; I'd like to order a heart valve replacement for a 2009 male Caucasian..."

So I was just limping along with increasingly frequent sinus infections, sinus headaches, and poor sleeping. Until December when it suddenly got much, much worse. And I'd picked the wrong item from the Kaiser menu so there was months of following the plan to solve some completely different problem than the one I had before we could finally cross-step.

So now I'm finally scheduled for CT scan and seeing the surgeon and hopefully getting surgery scheduled as soon as possible. And my allergist, who has been doing "wait and see," will finally see about an aspirin challenge and otherwise doing something other than prescribing more and more medications that treat the growing symptoms of a different problem.

But.

I've missed so many hours due to nasty head colds and episodes of severe fatigue HR is getting ready to kick me. And if that happens I lose medical care. I need to keep struggling on and somehow get perfect attendance even as the symptoms get worse and worse -- and somehow schedule all these doctor's visits off the clock -- until I can get what I hope will turn things around and set the clocks back a few years to where I was properly productive.

Perfect timing, of course. Right now we are repurposing my shop, buying new equipment, and very possibly changing my role in the company. We have a new prototype all over the tables right now and as usual at this company, everything is do-it-now priorities.

And of course simultaneously we have UL testing on another product that I am de-facto project lead and (oh hell no) lead engineer. I have been poaching real engineers when I can but there's a lot of work and a lot of pressure.

If only this was happening a few months later. I am looking forward to these changes, but they are happening now just when the strength I need is weeks away.

But.

Acute sinusitis. A very nasty bug got into my frontal sinuses and there's little that can be done. Sinuses too blocked for it to properly drain, and by the same coin, rinses and vapor and all that crap can't get up there. Infections of this kind are usually viral so don't respond to antibiotics (I'm on one anyhow). Oh, and I can't even take pain killers.

Stabbing pain, so bad I am almost unable to sleep. Pain so bad I am squinting both eyes even as I type this. Since Thursday (and there's another two days for HR to complain about). And it just won't end.

Monday is going to be...delightful.

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

We are not smart

 


Right after posting, I realized the problem isn't that I am writing too slowly. It is that I spend so much time feeling too stupid to write.

Well, instead of trying to figure out how to write a smart story when I am dumb, why don't I set out to write a dumb story?


Like the Asgard approach, this is smarter than it seems at first. What I mean is, give myself permission by doing a story that by genre and style is fine with shoddy world-building, plots full of holes, paper-thin characters.

And I do have one I've been thinking about. This approach could possibly take care of some of the issues I had with the idea, even.

Par for the Course

I should not have been hanging out in the write-o-sphere. Too many nice discussions on Quora, videos on YouTube, stuff like that.

The scene I am on is a perfect place to step back from all lectures, all the time.

Already, I was picking this as a place to come down hard with five-senses, but that was for other reasons. Anyhow, this seems like a good scene to try to communicate thematic points without someone sitting down and talking about them -- and this include using the narrative voice of my protagonist.

How exactly do I get across concepts like dérive in a 2,000 word scene of French people running around an office park?

Oh, but that's not the worst.

In the great battle between Pantser and Outliner it is recognized by both that discovering and bringing out the themes of your book, as well as the essential conflicts, core character development, and related deep-structural elements, happens in rewrites. So no surprise; I am changing what is on the table and where I want to focus.

Originally, the internal conflict that drives Penny for this book was whether to take up the mantle of hero. Amelia came on board first as an ordinary tourist to act as a mirror, reflecting the way that Penny has grown from naive tourist to experienced world traveler (as much as she might protest). She was useful as someone who understood the arts and could turn inner monologue into dialogue. Still talking-heads lectures, but one step more in the direction of being actually interesting. With that in there, it was a natural step to let he be a comic book geek, at least enough to start throwing the hero label in Penny's direction.

But on reflection this didn't work. She just got done fighting yakuza and nearly dying in the snow to answer that one. And looking into the mirror of a goddess, which should really finish off any questions of appearance versus reality. At least for a while!

So where her conflict is, has been changing as I write. It was largely behind the several rewrites, of what has become a process so long I may end up with cork-covered walls and an absinthe addiction before it is over.

And when I hit the parkour scene, I realized my first take (she's physically afraid of the challenge) is defensible but doesn't advance the important themes.

So I'm trying to define the themes of the book, find ways of bringing them out in this scene, and do it without spelling anything out with talking heads and idiot lectures. Right. This may take a few more weekends!

Sunday, March 3, 2024

Skip to my Louvre

The Conversation from Hell in now back in draft. And this weekend I plugged on through (against the trials and tribulations of new medications) to revise 1,300 words of Penny walking from the metro entrance to I.M. Pei's Inverter Pyramid in the Louvre Carousel.

Speaking of which. I am flipping back and fourth between French and English spelling in my notes, and in the text. Sometimes it is the Eiffel Tower, sometimes le Tour Eiffel.

(As a tower, it is "le." As "The Iron Lady" -- a frequent nickname -- it is "la." Aren't gendered languages fun?)

I'd probably use the French terms more often but Speech-to-Text throws fits at French. Or maybe it is just my French. Lately, with my exploding sinuses, it is throwing fits at everything, but it is still a good way to take notes on the fly. The scenes I just finished re-writing were not in speech-to-text. Or on the phone. I needed the real-estate of the mini and the two monitors connected to it for all the stuff I had to shuffle around or consult.

(Actually, whether I am getting faster at typing or what, I rarely cut-and-paste the material I am re-using. I drag over the bit of scene that has a new home, but then I re-type it, adjusting it to fit in with the flow of the current scene. For today's work, I could not find where I stuck the notes on religious buildings around Montmartre, but it made more sense for the scene to fly past that. But, oddly, I finally turned up something today that explained why there is still a martyrium in the area, after all the revolutions and gypsum mining and so on. It ain't the original.)

I am hopeful but rather less than sanguine that I might have a draft finished by April. Which would put it five years after the time the story takes place. And I don't know (and have stopped wanting to know) since I started.

I still need to revise the Egyptian Room scene, significantly. The Charles de Gaulle shouldn't take much editing; a big thing I've been doing is moving some "beats" around to give character and theme development better arcs, and there is some stuff in there that may need to be moved. And then I'll finally be in the parkour scene at La Defense where I left off for this last round of revisions.

I have dreams that the next Athena Fox story will take a different direction and, possibly, be easier. One problem I've had with this one is there isn't enough plot, and the plot beats unfold far too frequently in a "studying this artwork and knowing a weird detail about an Impressionist painter..." way. The Desert one should be able to have a lot more plot beats that are someone saying something incriminating or someone shooting bullets through a door. Hell, it may be the first story I write that has a proper Body Drop!

I won't need a Murder Wall to work that plot out, though. I will be doing a world book for Blackdamp, though. I finally realized that when I did a test draft of Alice's first scene (the first scene in the book) and I didn't know how many people there were in her class. So I'm going to ballpark the population figures and economies so I have some general grasp of things like, is there a whole street of goldworkers (or whatever appropriate cottage industry) or is there only enough work for one weird guy that does the stuff in his whatever-the-steampunk city-has equivalent of his garage.

And learn about Venus. Bought my first book already. I'm hoping I don't have to learn too much chemistry -- time consuming stuff, that -- but I am very afraid it will be far too important...

That book is looking to take a lot longer than April Next to write...

Saturday, February 24, 2024

Put on...the mask!

I don't remember what movie that was. 1950's horror movie about a cursed, well, mask. At certain points the audience was instructed to put on their 3D glasses and...

Sometimes a Fox is crawling along. I've been ridiculously sick basically since Christmas (tested positive AGAIN for COVID) and I'm lucky to get an hour or two of clear thinking before my brain goes out again...in a week.

Made progress on the next book, though. Watched several movies and read a new urban fantasy series cover to cover and messed around with a few games but being sick and feeling stupid isn't exactly the time you finally sit down with War and Peace.

Whatever I bumped off of, I finally accepted I wasn't actually against having my cast running around in oxygen masks. And there's some fun possibilities if you stick with the CO2 atmosphere.

The biggest reason not to tinker with Venus is that it becomes too easy. Once you've added "A wizard did it" to explain why the air is breathable now (or any number of other things), it becomes just a little bit too transparent how the world is being constructed to permit the story being told. It may not be a slippery slope but it looks like a slippery slope.

So, no magical lost Earth technology or remarkable feat of terraformation or anything. Instead I'm going to more-or-less use the real planet. Just bend it a little, like steampunk bends friction and tolerance and energy densities because I'm sorry, a charcoal fire and brass gears does not make you a good helicopter.

That decision bumped into discoveries I made doing a trial sketch of the opening scene. It is a sort of graduation exercise and...how many people are actually in this class? Um. I think this is going to be old-fashioned world-building, where I sit down and work out some general population numbers and basic economies so the places feel internally consistent.

Which means I probably won't finish that book this year, either.

Monday, February 5, 2024

Macramé

That's my new writing term.

So when you've got an A plot and a B plot (for a full-length novel, at least that, and probably a C and D as well) they mostly run on parallel tracks. It allows, among other things, for you to provide that action-reaction; when a major turn has happened in the A plot, we switch to the B plot to allow the reader to digest what has just happened before we throw the next A plot event at them.

Those threads cross, and depending on how on-the-nose you want to plot things, they may end up in a crisis or revelation point at the same time in some bring-together scene.

And of course you have the other threads; character arcs, world-building tasks, development of theme. All of those are also running, more or less parallel, and when possible with their big developments staggered so the reader can pay attention to the personal crisis or the unveiling of the Big Bad or the new information about a side character in (relative) isolation.

And then there are the macramé scenes. Those are the scenes when multiple threads converge and connect. Those can be the most satisfying when you finally get them to work. But that "finally" in there? Yeah, that's the problem. These scenes can also be a total pain.

Yeah, that's where the book is now.

I'm throwing out all of my old calendar marks. One year since starting, one year since the previous book...all of that is gone now. But...the story is set in April, and maybe, just maybe, I can have it finished by then. 

Wednesday, January 31, 2024

I can not read the fiery letters

Time to mess around with engraving wood on the new laser. I wanted cedar or something but I had some thin walnut around so used that.


That is just one of the all singing, all-dancing coffee machines we have at work. Three kinds of beans, three powders (the hot chocolate is good), twenty recipes. And hot water.

I'm on the psycho-drug now and no side effects yet. Cross all sixteen fingers...

Well, was sick enough yesterday I called in and spent the day home from the factory...working on another factory. Couldn't concentrate well enough to straighten out the current scene in the book. Took a couple more test videos. May put something up soon.