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Yesterday I wrote 2000 words and got a tremendous lot of story business accomplished. Today it's almost eleven, I've written 1700 words so far and I'm on a long break trying to get my unconscious brain to figure out what bridges what I just wrote with the next thing I know. After perilously close to 40 000 words the first on-screen utterly overt fantastical thing is about to happen. And it's something I've been looking forward to for a long time. But I'm kind of stuck in this little lull before the event, and I should just fling in the crisis and end the chapter right now on the cliffhanger.
But there's another event that I thought would happen in the same calendar year, and I can't figure out how it fits in with the disease outbreak that's about to dominate everything. So I'm dithering about it. It involves the music tutor changing his mind about folk music and suddenly becoming Bela Bartok. Yeah, the same music tutor who was a tossed-off line a few chapters ago: now this transformation has tremendous consequences for Yanek, mostly indirectly . .
On another front.
After reading that one in three Americans are living in or near poverty, I went looking to find out what the actual poverty threshold is. I found a nasty wikipedia article that claimed that poverty is overstated because the people we call poor in the US buy unnecessary things and own small appliances that some middle-class people don't, I finally found the US Census definitions. You have to wade through a lot of pages that tell you other things before you can find the one that allows you to download a spreadsheet with the actual numbers on it. There's also a link to the poverty levels that are used to determine if you can have benefits -- those levels are different. For some family sizes, the threshold is higher for benefits, but for people like me the HHS level is considerably lower than the census one. So you can count towards an understanding of how many needy people there are, but you can't get help.
Anyway, the surprising thing to me is how very low the poverty threshold is. For a person in my condition -- single and under 65 -- it's $11,344. For a family of four with two kids under eighteen it's $22,113.
Personally, it turns out, I am nowhere near the poverty line. If I had any kids, though . . . I'd be real close.
On the other hand . . . rent for a small apartment in Santa Cruz runs over thousand dollars a month: mostly over fifteen hundred a month. So a family in Santa Cruz would likely have four thousand dollars or less to cover everything else. And if I didn't have artificially low housing expenses due to having lived in the same house for thirty-four years and never being sucked into a variable-interest refinance scam, I would be living in my car at that level. Which would not be running, because I wouldn't be able to maintain it. And by the way, living in your car is extremely illegal in Santa Cruz. Fortunately for everyone, I am not living on eleven thousand a year and I do have artificially low housing expenses.
Do I have a point with this? Oh, right, if a third of Americans make little enough money that they could not both feed themselves and rent an apartment, are we still the richest country?
Now I have to figure out how to end this chapter and get out of bed.
edit: so I did it! I got to the end of the chapter, I got the cliffhanger introduced and effected, and the next bit should be pretty obvious tomorrow.
Actual day's total: 2600 words, chapter is 5200, book is I think 39 600 or so. I'll do an accurate-ish count on another day.
But there's another event that I thought would happen in the same calendar year, and I can't figure out how it fits in with the disease outbreak that's about to dominate everything. So I'm dithering about it. It involves the music tutor changing his mind about folk music and suddenly becoming Bela Bartok. Yeah, the same music tutor who was a tossed-off line a few chapters ago: now this transformation has tremendous consequences for Yanek, mostly indirectly . .
On another front.
After reading that one in three Americans are living in or near poverty, I went looking to find out what the actual poverty threshold is. I found a nasty wikipedia article that claimed that poverty is overstated because the people we call poor in the US buy unnecessary things and own small appliances that some middle-class people don't, I finally found the US Census definitions. You have to wade through a lot of pages that tell you other things before you can find the one that allows you to download a spreadsheet with the actual numbers on it. There's also a link to the poverty levels that are used to determine if you can have benefits -- those levels are different. For some family sizes, the threshold is higher for benefits, but for people like me the HHS level is considerably lower than the census one. So you can count towards an understanding of how many needy people there are, but you can't get help.
Anyway, the surprising thing to me is how very low the poverty threshold is. For a person in my condition -- single and under 65 -- it's $11,344. For a family of four with two kids under eighteen it's $22,113.
Personally, it turns out, I am nowhere near the poverty line. If I had any kids, though . . . I'd be real close.
On the other hand . . . rent for a small apartment in Santa Cruz runs over thousand dollars a month: mostly over fifteen hundred a month. So a family in Santa Cruz would likely have four thousand dollars or less to cover everything else. And if I didn't have artificially low housing expenses due to having lived in the same house for thirty-four years and never being sucked into a variable-interest refinance scam, I would be living in my car at that level. Which would not be running, because I wouldn't be able to maintain it. And by the way, living in your car is extremely illegal in Santa Cruz. Fortunately for everyone, I am not living on eleven thousand a year and I do have artificially low housing expenses.
Do I have a point with this? Oh, right, if a third of Americans make little enough money that they could not both feed themselves and rent an apartment, are we still the richest country?
Now I have to figure out how to end this chapter and get out of bed.
edit: so I did it! I got to the end of the chapter, I got the cliffhanger introduced and effected, and the next bit should be pretty obvious tomorrow.
Actual day's total: 2600 words, chapter is 5200, book is I think 39 600 or so. I'll do an accurate-ish count on another day.
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