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  Chrysoula 4:20 pm on February 12, 2007 | 15 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: general-zod (9), pregnancy (17), Writing

  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.

   

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  Chrysoula 8:43 pm on February 5, 2007 | 5 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: gardens (9), Me (341), Writing

  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.

   
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  Chrysoula 2:44 pm on January 30, 2007 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: general-zod (9), pregnancy (17), Writing

  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.

   
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  Chrysoula 10:26 pm on January 2, 2007 | 2 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Health (9), Me (341), Writing

  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!

   
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  Chrysoula 7:18 pm on November 1, 2006 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Writing

  my current mode, inspired by anime and superpowered epic fantasy: wherein one undergoes character growth and is rewarded with power growth and plot progression in response
  George R. R. Martin: undergo character growth, be punished by plot /regression/

   
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  Chrysoula 4:33 pm on November 1, 2006 | 0 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: tfn (23), Writing

  I’ve just realized I forgot to outline the second half of one character’s Thrones plot arc.

  I’m feeling the old familiar sensation of ‘this is too hard, this is too messed up, best bet is to throw it all away and start something new’. Yucky yuck.

  Edited to add: Still, I have to take some deep breaths. It’s more important to nail this part of the development cycle than the next part. Oh lord, the dogs are bickering again.

   
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  Chrysoula 12:47 pm on October 26, 2006 | 1 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Me (341), observations (4), Writing

  So, I’ve hit a snag on the outlining that will require a slowdown– some worldbulding, some re-consideration. My self-imposed schedule, as you might recall, is very tight. Even tighter, since I was aiming for finishing the outline on the 30th so I could have a day to breathe before launching into the text.

  I get all panicky when I think of my schedule as a hard deadline, as ‘must have X by end of November’.

  But when I think of it like I was taught to think of deadlines at work, as ‘I think I can have X by the end of November, but of course events may revise that’, I feel calm, relaxed, as if it’s achievable.

  I have to remember my theories about not rushing. But I also have to balance those against various unavoidable time limits. Juggle juggle.

   
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  Chrysoula 8:33 am on October 17, 2006 | 1 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: tfn (23), Writing

  I’m basically done with my ghost draft! Go go meeting milestones! I even got a taste of the bang-smash ending thrill.
  I think I’m better at coming up with justifications and explanations than I am at being spontaneously original.  Or at least, it’s much more satisfying and rewarding.

  Having a two-story house creates climate control problems!

   
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  Chrysoula 9:21 am on September 30, 2006 | 5 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Pets (17), Writing

  I hope I don’t always have an excuse. We’re almost out of the old house, almost done with that albatross. Then it’s just the unpacking. But that’s no excuse. I can’t always have an excuse. I mean that in an abstract intellectual way; that I can’t turn things I hate into excuses.
  That’s about not writing.

  But I haven’t been posting here so much kind of ’cause of Dante. My sleep schedule is messed up ’cause of him and all my posts used to either be right after I got up or at work.

  On Dante himself: I’m happy with him, except for the cat situation. Yeah, he destroys stuff, yeah, he fucks up my sleep schedule. Yeah, I might complain. Yeah, there’s stuff I’d change and yeah, we’re working on some of those. And yeah, I’m making it harder on myself than I have to in a few ways. If I kept him locked up in a very small space anytime I wasn’t ready to fully focus on him, things would be easier. And he might not even mind. Instead, I sometimes put him in the office when I leave home, or put him outside on a tieout line for a while during the day (and keep the door open and a close eye on both dogs) or on the other end of a leash I wear around my ankle. And I think, when it’s a baby, some of these things won’t be legal.

  Of course, it takes two humans to get a baby and just one human to get a puppy.

  Anyhow, might be time for my morning nap now.

   
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  Chrysoula 1:15 pm on August 28, 2006 | 3 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Writing

  A friend doesn’t enjoy reading fantasy novels but will happily snatch up fantasy movies and fantasy comics. Why?
  I think it has to do with establishing setting rules. With a non-familiar setting, pictures are worth a whole lot for establishing the basics. The sky is blue. The roads are paved. People carry guns. So many things can be established without ever drawing attention to them. But in most prose fiction, the convention is that setting details should be established through narration, and incorporated into the story itself. Show, don’t tell. This requires a lot more words than conventional modern fiction.

  I admit it, I’ve bought into the vague idea that fiction set in pre-existing settings (Star Trek, Werewolf, Forgotten Realms, fanfiction) is somehow not as cool as stuff set in an original world. It isn’t as prestigous. I suppose I’ve picked up some of that idea because the quality control on some licensed stuff doesn’t seem that great; like the publishers are relying on the license to sell books rather than the stories and writing. And I suppose that’s probably true.

  But now I’m wondering if there’s a confusion of motivations; if the readers aren’t embracing it just because it’s a license they’re attached to, but because with all of the setting basics pre-established, the stories are a much more enjoyable light read than ‘original fantasy’. This connects to the pleasure I’ve always felt reading stories set in comfortable well-established settings and my own interest in incorporating original mythological resonance in fiction.

  Okay, so, let’s take this as true: speculative fiction’s barrier to entry is the amount of setting internalization required of the reader (which usually neccesitates lots of dense prose that is difficult to make interesting without incorporating ‘tours’).

  Now, the challenge is to think of ways to present that setting information without incorporating it into the narrative. Comics and movies do it with images. Games do it with a dry presentation of the setting material that is then incorporated into RPG experiences. The trick there is getting people to read the setting material, which, in my experience, a lot of people don’t really want to do. It’s dry, it’s boring, they read the parts that relate to them (maybe) and make the GM help them figure the rest out later.

  I have some ideas, though.