lizvogel

I took a badly needed Day Off a few days ago, and spent it in bed with a book. It was glorious. Also, apparently the focus and pressure of tasks needing to be done is the only thing keeping me awake, because without it I was only good for about half an hour at a time before I dozed off again. Still, glorious.

However, since then I've been feeling not at all the thing. I'm convinced half of it is psychosomatic; my body quite liked not having to do anything for a day, and would like to do more of it. The cranky tummy could be due to the headache, which could be due to the usual neck+shoulder muscles. And the chills -- well, it's spring in Michigan, which means that yesterday it was snowing and it's supposed to be 80 on Tuesday, so adapting to the temperature is a joke anyway. But there does seem to be a little more going on than that. Pretty sure it's just a cold and not Covid (and won't it be nice when we don't have to add that caveat anymore?), but I'm going to take it easy and eat comfort foods for a while regardless.

I actually managed to see the Friday Five on a Friday and for once have the leisure to answer it, so I will:

1) Where's your favorite place to go connect with nature?

I suspect this list was written by a city dweller. Uh, my back yard? Or perhaps going for a walk around the pond, and seeing where the deer have trampled paths for themselves this year. The woodchuck and muskrats have made a heckuva mess of the bank on the west side, but as long as they keep to the parts I don't have to mow, we're all good here.

2) What's a disposable thing that you've found a use for?

You know those packages with the plastic blister mounted to a boxboard backing? Peel the plastic off, flip it over, and it makes a great paint mixing tray for small craft projects.

3) Where does your community need [to be] de-trashed?

By "community" I assume they mean in town; our town is actually fairly tidy. But may I just rant briefly about people treating the country roadside like a public trash dump? It's time for the annual post-winter patrol of the road-edge of the property, during which I will collect beer cans, fast food wrappers, and assorted other garbage that people have disposed of by flinging it out their car windows as they barrel past. Sometimes the garbage includes bills or other items with identifying addresses, and no, I haven't yielded to the temptation to return them to the owners along with everything else I've collected, but that time may yet come.

4) What's your favorite flower?

Irises are beautiful, and both periwinkle and wood violets are very pleasing to my eye, which is good considering their prevalence in the lawn. (We have both the traditional purple wood violets and several variations on white ones, some with purple striations.) But I think I will have to go with the lowly dandelion. They're bright, cheerful, and tenacious as all hell. How can you not admire that?

5) What positive change do you wish we'd all make?

List writer was clearly going for an ecology-related change, so I'll limit it to that. You know, I think I would be fairly happy if people would just keep their trash to themselves until they got to an appropriate place to dispose of it. And perhaps recycle the things that are fairly easy and efficient to recylce, like paper. I know recycling has its own set of issues, but some of it works pretty well, and yet so many people don't even bother to do that.

Been insanely occupied with convention stuff, trip planning, prep for another convention, and, oh yeah, there's supposed to be a life in there somewhere. But for once the Friday Five was all things I could answer easily, so typing this quickly before I lose momentum (or something else catches fire).

1. Is there a particular historical period or event, anywhere in the world, that fascinates you?

Several, but of course the Battle of Hastings is always my go-to. And the several decades of events leading up to it, which are fascinating in their own right.

2. Would you like to visit that time, or live in it permanently, or does the whole idea make you want to run screaming?

Oh, hell, no! I mean, time-travel tourism is always an intriguing concept, but no one with a lick of sense would want to be stuck in the middle of a couple of major wars, an invasion, the overthrow of a previously-stable government, and the upheaval of an entire social and political system. Watching it through a lens, not too darkly, sure; living it, no thank you.

3. What's the best piece of historical writing, nonfiction or fiction, you've ever read?

I don't know about the best, but certainly the one that had the most impact on me was David Howarth's 1066: The Year of the Conquest. Not only did it feed my already-eager interest in the period, but it introduced me to the concept of popular history as a thing people could write. For years that was What I Wanted To Do With My Life, and I still have great respect for the people who can consistently pull it off.

4. What's the worst?

Plenty of contenders here, including a number of stultifyingly dull textbooks, most of which I happily no longer have readily to hand for reference. The worst recently would have to be A Short History of Australia by Manning Clark, which combines the dual sins of being stultifyingly dull with not actually explaining anything about Australian history, but merely referring to major figures and events on the assumption that the reader already knows about them.

5. Is there a historical site you would love to visit?

Well, Hastings, again. Actually working on that at the moment, though the websites around Hastings and Battle Abbey could stand to be a deal more informative about times and schedules and things.

(As picked up from the time-sink that is the Network page) The rules are as follows: Go to page 7 of your WIP, go to the seventh line, and share seven sentences. Then tag 7 people who you know will see this to do the same.

So I pulled up Lightning Strikes Twice and went to page 7, and of course the seventh line is a bracket-note about something I have to go back and fill in later. ;-P

However, skipping down to the seventh line of actual text nets this:

"DeAugustine, are you listening?" the sphere inquired with surprising acerbity for such a small device.

"Hanging on every syllable, I assure you," Aubrey replied, his arm still at full extension to keep the tiny digital voice as far from their ears as possible.

"I'm not doing this for my health, you know. For yours, if anything. You might at least try to pay attention."

"I am riveted with fascination."

The device emitted something very like a snort of disbelief, and Kearsley pictured some poor analyst, trapped in a windowless office waiting for operatives to pick up their devices so he or she could recite briefings that they weren't going to attend to anyway.

I do love Aubrey. And Kearsley, for that matter. And this whole universe, really.


If you're reading this, you may consider yourself tagged.

To distract me from being PO'd at LJ's latest downgrade, a meme gacked from azdak:

Grab the nearest book. Flip to page 45. The first sentence describes your sex life for the next twelve months.

It is just occurring to me that today is a Thursday and I am not expected to--no, scratch that, I am expected not to--go into the office today, and I haven't the foggiest idea what to do with myself.

Given that the book in question is The Fuller Memorandum by Charles Stross, I suppose it could have been a lot worse. But still... um.



And no, I did not pick that music specially; WinAmp did that all by itself.

Gacked from azdak, the WIP 7x7x7 meme:

1. Go to page 7 (or 77) of your current WIP.
2. Go to line 7
3. Copy down the next 7 lines – sentences or paragraphs – and post them as they’re written.

The first novel seems to be in progress again, and the revisions are certainly work, so here goes. (I went with page 77, because that seemed more fun.)

"Don't get too smug," her mother warned. "I could still decide the whole idea's a waste of time." Which it might well be. Scott's plan B wasn't the worst she'd heard, but how much of her own agreement came from just wanting to see James again?

Haley sat straight up at Elle's remark, looking as not-smug as she knew how. Scott chuckled. "She can ride with me, in the surveillance van.

(To be crossposted to LJ, if it ever comes back up reliably.)


Gacked from synecdochic, I got an embarrassingly low estimated vocabulary on the Test Your Vocab quiz. 36,500 words. Better than the majority of native-English adults, but I still feel the need to spend some serious quality time with a dictionary.

On the other hand, I knew 44% of the hardest words on the test, and could doubtless make a fair guess at the rest of them in context. So at least I can fake being well educated.

(Note to self: adumbrate (to intimate, foreshadow, or give a sketchy outline of) is an awesome word, and I need to use it more.)

And yet, I still manage to use words so obscure that my beta readers don't even think they're words, and assume I must have made an impenetrable typo. Sigh.

No way am I touching that WIP meme that's going around. I am the Queen/Empress/fscking Goddess-Of-All of unfinished stories; if I never came up with another idea, and if I finished one old one a month, I would likely not run out of things to write for the rest of my life. Some of these stories are unfinished for sound aesthetic reasons, but many are languishing because I wrote so slowly that I lost interest, in the fandom/universe or in the story itself, long before they got anywhere near done. And there're quite a few that are still "live", i.e., jumping up and down in my head shouting "Now! Now!" -- but there's only one of me, drat it, and while I've improved my writing speed by orders of magnitude in recent years, they've still got me utterly outnumbered.


...Ack. In a moment of weakness, I started listing the shouters (concepts, not filenames; I doubt 8.3 would do much for anyone but me, even if some of them weren't paper- or neuron-only). I'm not sure if that was more scary or depressing, but either way -- no. I'm going to post this, and then I'm gonna go write something.

Does it count as procrastination if you avoidance yourself into doing what you ought to be doing?