Some things, some related to illness, and some not

[ritaxis]

I should be all, all better now, but I am only much, much better. I have had no fever or diarrhea for over a week, and I am back to riding my bike to work and working a full day, but I am tired a lot -- more than my usual low-energy normal -- and I feel sort of nauseous all the time, and my muscles feel hungry.  I think I was kind of malnourished before I got sick -- I was eating too much easy (bread and crap) and not enough green and orange.

So you know that thing where if you lose weight for any reason people are all unreasonably congratulatory even if you look like shit?  That happened.  I lost nearly ten pounds in five days and not an inch of belly fat, but somehow some people thought this was dandy.  I was pale and drawn and my butt was concave because at least some of the weight I lost was real, essential muscle, but I lost weight and therefore it's all good.  Mostly people understood why I was not happy about this, though.  Also, by now I have shifted things around (mainly by walking the dog and the extra dog an extra time a day and returnign to work) and I have in fact lost a bit of belly fat and built up a bit of leg muscle again.  I'm eating more carefully and sleeping better, and I expect that I will come out of it altogether in a better place, eventually. I imagine that by now I have gained back most of the weight I lost, but I am not sure because the home scale is accurate to 15 pounds or so.  That is not a typo.  I can lean back and forth and make that needle swing that much.  I rarely use it, and when I do, I swing the needle back and forth a few times and try to remember how it swung the last time, and how it compared to a real scale.  I should just throw it away.

Not about illness: the ultimate reason for the extra dog walk is that I have always intended to add that mornin walk for her sake and mine. The proximal reason is that she has not had access to the yard for a while because my wodnerful brothers in law have torn down the deck and are part way through replacing it with a better one.  The alert reader will notice the presence of the extra dog.  For the last couple of days, and for the rest of the week until Monday, I have the one brother in law's dog with me.  Truffle and Roxy are very dear friends, so this is not a burden.  It does make the morning and evening walks all the more urgent because Roxy is even more dependent on the walks to keep her system regular and even less likely to allow other people to take her out. But that is fine, because, as I said, I need the added exercise to stimulate regrowth of my muscles after the illness.

Oops, partly about illness after all.

I have also taken up the not-Poland novel in earnest again.  I was disappointed that my run through did not make the early parts of the book any shorter.  In fact, it is probably ten or fifteen sentences longer, over all.  I believe that at some point the various events of Yanek's childhood will be able to collapse in on themselves like an accordion, but apparently I lack the perspective to effect that right now.  So I'm going forward.  In the intervening months the weird pederastic soldier has dropped out of the story -- I was able to simply slice him right out, which was a great relief -- and a minor character, a fellow apprentice in the Ministry of Development, has taken on a more prominent role.  I kind iof like Vilem but I am afraid he's going to do Yanek some mischief before long, and he has already contributed to the coming disaster in a way I am not sure I am proud of.

I had to stop tonight because I have to contemplate my salt peter production research and figure out what's actually going to show on the page.  There's a seductive opportunity for a treacherous little infodump looming, and I am certain that I want to avoid that, but I am not certain in what manner I want to avoid it.  There are several.

I can skip the whole day going to the salt peter works, but I've already set up that this is going to be a point at which the young Duke's growing frustration with Yanek is going to rise a notch.  Actually, it already did.  But what should happen during the day is that they should have a bit of a reconciliation, but not enough.  Also skipping the whole day means losing an opportunity for a bit of battlefield foreshadowing.

I can just avoid the parts where the foremen explain crap to the young men: I know I'm going to do this as much as possible because I don't want to sit through an exposition on how saltpeter is made any more than I want to make my readers sit through one.  I can just go, they went there, it stank, this happened, they explained stuff, they agreed to add this chunk of land the foremen mentioned to the survey, and then they went home.

Most of this can happen off camera anyway and come up in conversation later.

Anyway, since Yanek is going to spend the next eight months on this, there's klots of opportunities for the bits that need to come out of it. I think I am spending like five pages, ten at the most, on those eight months.  I really doubt ten.

And then the disaster that the whole book until now has been about getting to, will be got to.  Yanek has eight more months as a Duke's foster son and a theoretical free man.

Though I figured out why the Duke would never have him "named" (it's a thing where they give the boy a "third name" -- a religious name, most often -- and say he is a man: sort of like a confirmation or a bar mitzvah) -- it has to do with the Prince's family's inheritance issues again, of course.  If Yanek gets named, even with the marriage contract that explicitly cut him out of the Prince's inheritance, there's an interpretation of inheritance laws available that makes him the final heir toi the Prince's holdings.  And in the ancient inheritance practices that I'm borrowing from for the Prince's family -- practices that regularly bankrupted Polish nobility within a couple of generations (leading to constant replacement with new noble families) before they finally demanded the right to impose primogeniture like civilized people -- every adult child gets a share of the family's wealth, and the youngest gets the home estate.  Which the Prince's other many children would find oppressive and insulting, as Yanek had never lived at or even seen the home estate.  (These are families which "own" mulitple villages and estates and county-like tracts of land: so the older children get different pieces as they grow up and get named if they are boys or married if they are girls) So the Duke would be reluctant to give anybody the idea that Yanek could be encouraged to try for that interpretation of things.  Yanek's actually provided for, with a bit of his mother's dowry she peeled off for him (and which the Duchess resents because it means that the Duke feels it necessary to enhance Ludmilla's share of the dowry from his own holdings -- the Duke's family actually has a modified primogeniture thing going on, because the Steinbrenners are tentative modernizers).  But by never being "named" -- and not being a member of any iof the ethnic minorities that don't practice this bit -- Yanek will never seem to present that sort of threat, but also, he will never be a completely legal adult -- something which I guess he has to bluff over later when he signs as Ludmilla's adult brother for her to marry without her father's consent.

Fortunately by then he will have lost the timidity he's infected with now.