Attract Mode

I’ve been reading about entropy and the laws of thermodynamics again. I can’t help myself! I have questions and ideas, and no physicist handy. I have to stop now, though, because my eyes are bleeding, even though I’m ignoring all the formulae and everything.

You know how when you read or say a word over and over again, it becomes divorced from its meaning and you can appreciate just how weird a sound/shape it is? My bleeding eyes have reached that point with The Laws and their extrapolated consequences.   The heat death of the universe is just… stupid. And entropy? It’s the plot hole of thermodynamics.

Every magical universe I invent is significantly less bizarre than this one.

I have not received a letter of congratulations (as did my friend Justin) nor is Citadel of the Sky listed among the 836 posted finalists. I’m pretty confident that I have NOT made it to the semifinals.

I am rather sad.

I have a lot of stuff to think about. For example, I think perhaps I should go ahead and submit Citadel to agents to at least get some practice doing that with my practice novel. I don’t know exactly how I want to go about doing that yet. Maybe I should have somebody else read the revised version first, but I’m not sure, since I don’t know if I have the stomach for more Citadel revision right now.

There’s a reviewing contest associated with ABNA. The 3 people who write the most high quality reviews get a Kindle and a $2000 AC gift certificate. I’d love a Kindle and GC but I suspect the competition will be fierce.

I’m going to start work on another couple of projects.

I have often been of the opinion that practice only makes perfect if you’re actively trying to improve. That is, repetition does not guarantee an increase in skills if you’re not seeking to challenge and improve yourself.

Writing has been hard for a long time. A while back I realized it had something to do with the words– with thinking about the words rather than being caught up in the story. When I’m caught up, it’s much easier, and faster.  I realized this but I couldn’t really identify any more than that and I kept on slogging away at the words.  I kept hoping one day the words would get easier, magically– that if I kept on slogging I’d somehow learn to write more quickly again.

It just now occurred to me that was repetition for repetition’s sake– that if I want to improve my speed, I need to stop trying the same thing over and over and over again without any basic variation or analysis. I know thinking about the words isn’t fast. It doesn’t work. Why am I still doing it?

Time to start practicing something new.

In other news, Robin can roll from back to side to front, given the slightest bit of uneven surface to start from. No progress on front to back. Practice, practice.

I’m all worn out from a grocery shopping trip! I haven’t had a very productive week; I’ve done some dishes, some laundry, showered, and now, shopped. I’ve read a lot– reread some Discworld and the Chrestomanci Quartet and read Sabriel by Garth Nix finally. I started Lirael last night but I decided to put off any more reading until this evening.

The last prenatal appointment was also my monthly deadline for writing. I got a little over 1/10th of the way to the amount Kevin requested. At least that means it would be almost impossible to do WORSE this month.  But you can see by my progressbar that I’m having a lazy start again.

To be honest, I’ve spent way too much time refreshing the blogs of various people I know, especially (but not exclusively) the people with babies. Why aren’t you people telling me more about your babies? I’ve got one, growing inside me right now!

When I was a kid, I somehow developed the idea that an unborn baby was hooked into its mother’s nervous system: that it would see and feel what the mom saw and felt. Legacies of that idea still follow me; I have to remind myself that if I want the baby to have any chance of hearing me, I have to say words out loud. The baby mostly lives in a little cave inside of me, connected to me mainly via circulatory stuff. Well, a soft cave. Okay, a sack.

Still not done with IF thingie, IFers. Sorry. Not forgotten about. Something to do with insecure PHP variables supposedly.

Just planted the everbearing strawberries. They arrived a few days ago, a bit early, and I wanted to get them into dirt and water.

That Carouselchain story is still basically not done. It started out well, went along for a while, and once I started having real trouble with it the writing took a turn for the worse. Now all that’s left is a climax of sorts and I even know what it is but I’m plagued by doubts that it’s lame. I think I should write it anyhow so I can put it in the ‘to be edited’ pile rather than the ‘to be finished’ pile but it’s so easy to find distractions.

While I suddenly seem to have lots of ideas for stuff that is totally experimental or a tried-and-true nonsale (like poetry), Kevin has been gently nudging me on the road of novels. I think I can start up TFN 2 again. I hope. What I think and what turns out to be true have so little in common these days, with regards to my writing.

It continues overcast here. Dante likes to chew on the peat pots I got for my seedlings, sometimes with seedlings inside. I need to get him more officially sanctioned chewbones.

In the name of writing, I’ve been exploring national tourism sites, building a list of ‘well-known features/attractions of a country’.

Cooking, sleeping, very bad housekeeping, American Idol, Disgaea 2, shouting at dogs, visiting seedlings, reading books on decorative painting, thinking about writing, scribbling bad poetry. Running errands. Coughing up breakfast and a lung. That about sums things up. Expect a pregnancy-themed post Monday afternoon, if my doctor actually manages to keep our appointment.

I’m so damn embarrassed by this– by what a gentle person would call writer’s block. So damn ashamed.

I’ve been vaguely inspired to poke at some worldbuilding, though. For a different setting entirely, of course.

I have problems doing extended generalized worldbuilding for Carouselchain. It’s so very big and it doesn’t map well, what with all the mobile skylands. It has my happy-making original elemental system, and I’ve done a lot of basic metaphysics for it but I just haven’t been able to sit down and detail out a large percentage of countries and peoples. This is kind of because it’s supposed to be able to contain, well, not everything, but an awful lot. I mean, I don’t want to set things there if I’m not comfortable with the setting having flying islands and potential access to a variety of sentient nonhumans. It’s an unbounded setting, where I haven’t even answered a lot of the basic questions I make myself answer in world-creation.

So, anyhow, I’ve been working on Calizene, home of the Alexandrine (Alexandrian?) Empire and setting of the unwritten Victoria novels. Well, when I say ‘working’, I mean that I’ve been going over old notes on it, and digging up old notes on another entirely different cosmological system that I decided to integrate into it. The setting is already the victim of one integration, because I came up with two separate magical elemental systems at two different times. (These aren’t crazy new elemental systems, just an arbitrary assignment of some of the old familiars. When I say elemental systems, I think I mean ‘fundamentals of magic’)

Integrating settings is hard but I think it will ultimately make for something richer. Something I’ve been infatuated by in recent years is obscuring the cosmology. My very oldest settings all featured a world that basically understood itself. The gods were the gods, the creation of the world and the role of humanity was all stuff that was written down and understood. After all, a lot of the stuff I read was like that. Then I started believing that all the fun came when people didn’t understand the universe. In Engines of Heaven, there are only two layers of obfuscation, and tearing away one of them is the point of the story. In Carouselchain, the happy-making elemental system is obfuscated and every culture has their own imperfect understanding of how and why magic works the way it does. However, because I tell everybody who shows the slightest interest how the setting’s magic works, it’s not a very interesting tool for storytelling. It was originally designed as a game setting.

TFN (Citadel of the Sky) has, oh, around two layers of obfuscation. Possibly a few more. As with Engines of Heaven there’s a Secret of the Universe that will never show up in any written form, but that I know and use to shape the answers to various important questions. In Engines of Heaven the other veil is important and global, whereas in TFN… well, I won’t say. Let’s just say that TFN is a bit more complicated.

The thing is, obfuscation is hard for me. I come up with ideas I think are cool and I want to share them. The best I’ve been able to do is try to build theories around fragments of The Truth. So the more complicated The Truth is, the more theories I can come up with. I don’t think Calizene has a Secret of the Universe yet, or at least nothing I’ve come up with so far feels Secret. There are lots of lower-case secrets but they’re mostly of the ‘meant to be discussed someday’ variety. However, this may be because Calizene is most likely to have the sort of thaumaturgical physicists who dig that deep. Carouselchain is very magical but it’s fantasy-practical, Engines of Heaven is idealistic steam-punk, TFN is deconstructionist (reconstructionist?) epic. I think I’d describe Calizene as, well, for lack of a better phrase at the moment ‘old imperial gothic’.

I finally feel comfortable explaining why.

I’m pregnant! Today we had an ultrasound that placed me 9 1/2 weeks pregnant, due September 11 (just as I expected), a little over 1 inch long and a heartbeat of 166 beats per minute.

Oh yes, lots of symptoms. Exhaustion. Morning sickness since, oh, four weeks? Nearly constant morning sickness. Luckily I’m very attuned to what I feel like eating and careful listening has allowed me to neither gain nor lose any weight. Cheese is the very best.

Also, sniffly sneezing coughing so you can’t sleep thingie. Basically, a constant cold. And I sleep in 4-5 hour stints, twice a day, with a 2 hour nap sometime in there, usually.

My story is about 3/5 done, in terms of major events? It shall definitely be done by next Friday, and maybe even by Wednesday. Oddly, I’d been beating myself up about not finishing it until just now, when I planned out the sentence: babies are on an unpredictable schedule and thus so am I!

It’s been really hard not sharing the utter misery of the past month and a half with the world. But a heartbeat has been confirmed, and so now I’m ready to share the ups and downs with every stranger who happens by.

The developing embryo has been named General Zod. It dwells, of course, in the Phantom Zone. Blame Michelle.

Shiny shiny. Kevin’s fault. Work of a weekend.

We got a new houseplant yesterday, a peace lily. I also got an orange tree and a Meyer lemon tree! Well, I say tree but they’re both tiny bushes at the moment. Well, I say tiny but they take up all of Kevin’s dressertop. I dunno if they’ll actually bear fruit, but the window they’re in is a second-story south-facing window that gets the most light in the house. So we’ll see. Still, the orange tree was in bloom already, and oh my goodness orange blossom is intoxicating.

We also got some humidifiers, a big one for upstairs and a small one for downstairs. They’re just the evaporative kind but they definitely make the house a more pleasant place. Between the trees and the bedroom humidifier, Kevin’s actually managed to convince me to close my bedroom window, which hasn’t happened in many years. I’m really sensitive to the smell of stale air!

I wish I had more to report than that, especially on the writing front. Aren’t you all tired of that mantra? I sure am. Okay, here’s the thing.¹ Clap your hands if you DO believe I can have a finished new Carousel Chain story fresh for reading here by Friday morning. Er, and post here as well, or else the little fairy might not hear you.

“Just think, with a tiny portion of your daily Internet interest-allotment, this starving artist can earn her keep for the week! No charity has ever asked for less, and no gift will ever do more!” ²

¹I clearly don’t care about disappointing myself*, but maybe I’ll shy away from disappointing other people. Possibly. If there are enough of them that I can’t dismiss it as a fluke.

²For less.

*And this is not the time to fix my self-esteem. That’s better done when I’m producing, anyhow.

For three weeks, I’ve been either nauseas or starving or both. In addition, I’ve been sneezing like crazy, coughing and mildly congested. The cramps have mostly faded although I’ve noticed that when I sneeze and I’m standing it seems to make strange muscles convulse on either side of my pelvis. My diaphragm hurts from all the coughing.

These reasons are why I haven’t been writing much! Not much to say except ‘I feel miserable!’. And I don’t want to worry people so I haven’t been saying that.

I have extra-restless legs some nights, which make it hard to sleep, but otherwise, I do a lot of sleeping. Not quite as much as a few weeks ago, at the moment. At the moment it seems like some of the more life-ruining symptoms are slooowly tapering off. I think I’m somewhere between 7 and 9 weeks along. (Kevin keeps track of the details.) I have an appointment with a registered nurse on Friday.

I had my first pregnancy-related dream last night. Kevin and I were going to the French countryside for a two-week vacation but I was having trouble packing, and then I realized we hadn’t bought plane tickets either. Kevin was pretty calm about it all although he simply refused to help me pack (which is very unusual).

I think this pretty accurately sums up the current situation. There’s something kind of nice on the horizon, even though it features a language we don’t speak. We’ve both been in the vicinity before and rather liked it, anyhow. I have to stuff everything I need for this experience into a smallish package, it’s making me miserable and there’s not much Kevin can do to help. And we don’t even know if we’re going to make it there, so maybe all this misery has been pointless. Oh, and we managed to plan everything (at least vaguely) but the date of departure.

I like how my brain produces these dreams. One part of it says ‘this is an abstracted description of your situation’ and another part, the flaky part, goes searching until it comes up with a parallel situation. And I think it honestly creates a parallel situation because it’s a dork. Seriously. I’m the person who (as a child), when given a locket saying ‘CFT’ on it, decided it must stand for ‘Conley Fall Tzavelas’, my family’s last names. Rather than ‘Chrysoula Fidelia Tzavelas’, my name.

Anyhow, the best part is that I don’t usually see the metaphor until I describe the dream to somebody else, and notice what details are important enough for me to put into words.

I fell down today and twisted my ankle! Ow! My dogs were not sympathetic and now I am sitting, foot up. No swelling but it hurt a stunning amount for a while. Less stunning now. Still very hard to walk.
This is the year of writing! I don’t think I can do a meaningful wordcount though, because I’m doing it in such stages…. writing a summary, dictating, cleaning up dictation, eventual rewriting. But goal-wise, I’d like to finish three books and may aim to finish four. Well, by ‘finish’, I mean ‘in rough draft form’. I’d like to do detailed world creation for two settings. And I’d like to submit the TFN trilogy by September or so.

Um. I have a lot of self-doubts. My reaction to hurting my ankle was to lounge around on a couch playing a video game, instead of soldiering on. I haven’t met any deadline I’ve set yet. I have a role model self inside but I’ve fallen down on pressuring myself to measure up to her. Hoping too much for external pressure, I suppose. And falling prey to too many distractions. I WANT to stay aware of the world, want to pursue external adventures, but I think especially without medication, I need to utterly lose myself. I will probably be able to post about myself when I feel like it and I think I should since I forget my past otherwise, but… wow, tuning out is hard.

I HAVE been very sleepy lately, and in my sleep, dreaming again. Yay!