(no subject)

So now I know how financial aid for foreign medical schools works, and that's why we're taking out a loan on the house. Just for this year, so far, because we don't want to be paying on the rest of it for longer than we have to. Also because the interest rates on the Stafford loans are not much worse than we can get on the house.

I want to make a hypertext novel. Of course the best candidate for that is Bella and Chain, which is already hypertext, but I'm not returning to it until I have a first draft of A Suitable Lover and a final draft of The Conduit. (which might make a good hypertext novel too, and also might make a graphic novel if anybody wanted to draw a lot of hoboes and migrant workers, plus a Band of Scary Things from Beyond the Fields We Know)

I am so unfocussed.

Talked to the law student today. His anxiety levels are not going down. Nor is his intense feeling that he must beat out the competition or be doomed to perpetual failure (which is defined as making less than $100K a year. This boy grew up poor, by the way).

Yesterday was the Arboretum plant sale (and the Native Plants Society, in one spot). I bought:

salvia sinaloensis
salvia pink thing
another salvia
two ginormous salvias
leonotis
mimulus selection (deepish speckled orange)
australian thing kind of like a mimulus but different
piggyback plant (California streamside native. I must be crazy. I never water in August! but I'm going to put in a drip system, I swear)
2 iris douglasiana natural hybrids, essentially for the nice fellow

I have planted five of these in my front yard. The others go in the back over the next couple of days. Have to take advantage of the planting season (that is, the rainy season).

Yesterday was also the farmer's market, and I spent a whole heck of a lot of money getting everything I could imagine except chard, celery and turnips, which I think I will get anyway at the grocery store. ( food TMI, but nothing really gross )

Also, am I the last person in the world to discover Crystal Waters? Nice voice.

chapter two

I just saved chapter two. The hard thing about going from 1st to 3rd is that the protagonist doesn't have a name yet. In first that's not a problem, it's just "I." In third you have to make it clear who you're talking about some other way: unless the protagonist is the only one in the story of its gender, it gets no unique pronoun,so it needs a unique name. To make matters worse, the protagonist has the quality of answering to whatever name you think he has. So it's misleading to refer to him by the names that the other characters are using for him (in the first two chapters he's been George, Sonny, and Pedro. It will get worse before it gets better). I am not at all happy with the solution I've embraced at the moment: the narrative refers to him as the Interface. I might be happier with a lower-case letter on that, since it's not a title of office but a regular noun like "typewriter." He being, at first, an object.

Other than that, the chapters are getting a couple-three hundred words longer, but there may end up being fewer of them as I front-load some of the material that originally never showed up until much later.

On another front, Malouma has an even better voice.