Peeking into the rock

But I finished the chapter instead, another 1000 or so words 2100 today, 65725 total in the book now.
Tomorrow: fix and finish the very last chapter, go back to the beginning and retcon the stuff about memorials and the dead.

Then: go through the whole thing looking for continuity stuff, making sure that the tech is the same (or logically different) throughout, check for glossary items -- I don't think a book should need a glossary, and I don't think this one needs it, but I gather that a lot of people like them, and it made me feel good to work on it when I wasn't otherwise progressing.

Then the draft is done.

Then I'll send out queries.

I only added 117 words today but I figured out how to actually make this last bit of the second-to-last section work.  And the words I added might actually make it clear that babies are routinely born prematurely in this world (this seems to be a theme of mine, routinelky premature babies and what that means for medical care and family life), and I think that I may have gotten across that neonatal intensive care is not in an incubator crib but in a blanket made of biological entities.  Think of a blanket of living skin, maybe. I'm sort of gratified that 21st century science fiction is now getting a description -- and that it's all about what I've doing over here.  Non-US centric!  Biologicals!  Look at this review of Barth Anderson's Patron Saint of Plagues by Cheryl Morgan over at the Emerald City which is a really interesting zine anyhow.  And there's a further discussion at Ian McDonald's lj. 


Non-US-centric.  Biological tech, micro, macro, nano. That's me.   (Cue grumbling, but I have to go now)

1. The Namenda (anti-dementia drug) is working for Gloria. She's much more with-it that she was a week ago. However, this is not a magic cure, and the inevitable direction of things is the same.

2. Frank had a ride-along with the fire department yesterday (for his EMT recertification). The students were advised to take treats with them for the firefighters. Frank took his signature pecan pie. One of the firefighters said "Hmm, do you know how to make a chocolate mousse cake?" and gave him the recipe. I'm thinking, if there's an opening in the fire department, somebody might say, "Hey, this is the guy who brought the pie!" (he also got a good evaluation for his professionalism and stuff, too)

And also, the captain who signed off on him is a local celebrity -- Brett Taylor, who has a Salsa and Latin Jazz public radio show and mcs a lot of music events -- the all-city kids' band concert (by which I mean, not a single band recruited from the best players in the district, but every band from all the schools, elementary on up), the all-weekend free outdoor concert in the street put on by the Cabrillo Music Festival (which, I am told, is a world-class event, but I've never been to the festival proper yet, just the outdoor thing), stuff like that. He's an impressive guy, too, smooth deep voice and fine to look at. Yes, he's a fireman, so of course he looks good, but he's also especially handsome, with really dark skin and just a really nice twinkly-eyed expression. He came to my Spanish class and did a presentation, too.

3. It looks like we're going to have a good plum crop after all, but not much in the way of apples, and I didn't for a moment think we'd have many apricots after the severe pruning we did last year (part of which happened by accident: I accidentally broke a major branch and had to trim it all the way back instead of just taking off this sucker I was trying to get)

4. It's really summer by my usual measures except the grass is green.

5. I'm considering doing more vignettes for Afterwar from the refugee's POV, mostly to make it longer, but I'm thinking I might be able to develop some of the things I have regretted not getting to.

What I love about working on a piece that is almost finished is going through and tightening, expanding, condensing, packing in more information, tying bits together to make the world richer. I find an inconsistency and I might fix it by embracing it: in the current chapter one townsperson says that the nearest clinic is in one town and several pages later another townsperson says the nearest clinic is in another town. I thought about it and I gave Pablo the chance to say "well at least that's not as far away as what we heard before."

And I've been putting in a word here, a few words there, to develop the vision of living buildings and roads. I love it. I have a whole world constructed of commensal organisms: plants, animals, fungi, bacteria, bred to produce and channel energy for homes, convert waste to various products (and energy), act as a communications network: the roads and paths are made of "turf tarmac," which is living organisms in a mineral matrix, and that's how the vehicles are steered and kept informed about the conditions ahead. I love this stuff. Some of my favorite modern sf doesn't make sense to me because there's no clear path between the nano source and the macro product. So I've been thinking about the meso level most of all.

I think meso is the write right word, anyway.

Anyway, it's going to take a little longer than I thought to finish, because there's a bunch of this stuff to do. And more typoes than I thought.

Edited: Speaking of typoes, why would I write write when I mean right?  And just now, I came very close to writing wright for both of them.

I still haven't mailed the envelopes. I forget what happened on Monday -- first I was cleaning, then I was trying to figure out the math of how to get to the demonstration either before or after the washing machine repairman, then I was cleaning some more while the washing machine repairman was here, then I was trying to figure out if the demonstration would still be there if I left right now, then I was talking to the nice fellow and Frank about the demonstration, and then -- I didn't get to the post office. Or the demonstration, which was huge, but Frank got there. The nice fellow tried. Tuesday I had oral surgery. Wednesday I was with Gloria. Today is Thursday.

I have made a character grid for the paranormal romance. All my notes for it are on my jump drive, and so is the entirety of Afterwar. I love my jump drive. There are hours at a time at Gloria's where I can write if I have my work with me, and I do write -- yesterday I wrote most of a review for The Silver Bough by Lisa Tuttle, whose pub date was April 25 (short version: read it). It only needs de-gushing and a little intellect enhancement and then it's ready to go. And I didn't even have my jump drive because Frank needed to borrow it. Which makes me feel stupid: of course that's what I should have given him for his birthday.

Anyway, now that everything's on the jump drive I can finish Afterwar at Gloria's, and then start the romance.

I'll try to get the envelopes mailed from Watsonville today.

The sleep study was ambiguous -- I have an extremely mild apnea, not apparently enough to account for the blood pressure problem (which appears to have been solved anyway) but they want to treat me anyway because of my "daytime sleepiness" which I do not have (but I did have thirty years ago which they seem to have mistaken for a current problem). So I don't think I'll make that appointment -- insurance doesn't cover CPAP, and the nice fellow actually does have a problem, which will be expensive enough to pay for. And I think once I get him on the machine I'll sleep much better.

I think I sleep better if I go to bed first, anyway -- so I'm pretty well in sleep zone before he starts snoring and choking and stuff.

The index page of Bella and Chain seriously needs to be fixed. And it will be. But I spent all day on it trying to get everything on it, and also have it look good and be functional, and finally I just put it up like that.

Here's how it's going to work. I'm only going to update the chapter view a little more often than once a month, but the journals will have something new in them every day -- maybe something small, maybe something large. Documents that are not in the jounrals -- such as the Open Book newsletters or Harry's things -- will appear at the website but they'll be linked to from nonyomni's journal. I'm going just now to check that the comments are enabled in the journals, so if you want to argue with somebody about something, it will be possible.

The other thing that's going to happen in a couple of minutes is I'm going to upload a few pictures. Some Halloween pictures and I'm not sure what else. Probably the plastic wrapped berry fields pictures. I was taking pictures all summer but I haven't loaded them. I will catch up, gradually.

I will still be transcribing and posting The Donor. It's all written, so that's not a distraction. And I haven't really given up on Afterwar.

I refuse to use the word "meme" until every shred of the stupid misunderstanding about genetics and evolution that spawned the word has been dead and buried forever and forever.


Here are the first lines of the things I have around that are unfinished. I don't work on a lot of things at once. Most of these are things that are on hold for now.

Afterwar(which I am finishing real soon now, especially since I figured out that another 5-10K will make the last 5K easier to write)
From the plane you could not see the scars of the war. In this season the land was green and serene and healthy, a great lustrous animal supporting the symbiont cities, and fields, and parkland, and pulsing with clean, new, intelligent roads. But Pablo knew the scars existed, down below, subtle ones and shocking big ones, still telling the story of the racking disease of the war twenty-odd years before.


Bella and Chain (actually, I think the real beginning is different, but this is the earliest line I've written)
Bella spent Tuesday night on her latest star tower project. When her sister called, asking what she was up to, she had to answer "I'm stacking animals. And re-stacking them."

Clory's Contract(this is an amusement I return to now and then)
The first kiss was a surprise. Clory had imagined it before. but he had never expected it.

Mickey(working title)(this is a side effect of Esperanza Highway
All the students in one place and in one type of clothes and all with the same pile of papers in front of them and you could still pick Mickey out of the crowd. He sat at the dining hall table, his paperwork in front of him, his name tag disregarded, focussed on the welcome speech. Only Mickey held himself so rigid and sullen. Only Mickey frowned at every sentence the staff spoke.

Untitled (Damned Nation)(this is on hold due to lack of plot)
Hell is a bordertown factory, and there is no individual redemption.

A White Stone (working title)(this is turning inside out a novel that was rejected with encouragement)
A man walked into the Inmelr town from the western road, on foot like a harvest follower, but dressed well, in kingfisher blue and green, and carrying two instruments: a gittern, which while it had a low reputation was as capable of respectable music as any lute, and a hurdy-gurdy, which could do nothing but make a loud, rude, and thoroughly wonderful noise.

No Working Title
Felipe came up to the valley early in February, his pruning knife and his hook in his pants and a pair of old boots on his feet. There was work for him, though it was not at first easy to find. Joined a plowing gang for Mack, whose rancho was most of the land that had belonged to the Mission five years before and who intended to grow sugar beets though he had gotten a late start. Mack was the determined type of American, who thoughta pistol and a vision of success would suffice to bully the virgin land of California and the Indians hiding in it into producing abundance and profits never seen before by farmers who merely knew the land and worked it themselves.

I wanted to go on and put in the first lines of finished things that were unpublished, but that was a lot. All of them, actually, but a lot of them. So I didn't.

On other fronts, I saw the Mime Troupe yesterday, and it was the last summer show of the year, so it will do you no good for me to rave about it.

On still other frints, I am gradually becoming convinced I do have to do a Blandness Diet for a couple of weeks to see if it will cure my aching tongue and resurging reflux cough. This is not a happy thing. I think I will add the lovely things of life back in after a little while whether it gets better or no. If it gets better I will want to see if there is some compromise that will allow me to eat like a Californian. If it doesn't get better there's no point in eating like a -- I don't know what. like a person who eats bland things.

So the basic schedule is a chapter a week but I'm getting ahead of that right now for a couple of reasons, one being that Afterwar isn't going so well and another being that I want to have it done. So in seven weeks or so, I've put up nine chapters. There are twenty-five chapters. It will be up in its entirety, I hope, by January or so. But I'm not that good at predicting.

I think I'm feeling low for physical reasons. I have not been using the cortisone asthma inhaler, the maintenance one, while I've been fighting the thrush, because cortisone in your mouth tends to mess up the immune response a bit. And I've been doing cleaning and yard work, sanitizing things I've let get nasty, sweeping in the yard, and so on. Not industriously by other people's standards. But I think I've got a low level asthma thing going on.

I meant to make a pie for the nice fellow to take to game night, but I didn't even make dinner. I did pick a bunch of apples which are sitting in a bowl in the kitchen waiting for me to come up to speed again. But Zak, I hear from his mom (we don't sort clearly by generations over here), made a pie tonight. Zak told us about the Cox's Orange Pippin apples at the farmers' market (Casalegno, for any local folks, one of those little Soquel truck farms, this one is up Old San Jose Road almost to the summit, they're the same family that owns Casalegno's Market who got into trouble for profiteering and price gouging after the Loma Prieta earthquake and my, don't we sound rural). We got some and they were indeed lovely. They look more like Gravensteins than pippins and it makes me wonder about the relationship of Gravenstein, Pippin and maybe other apples.

I've been reading Wise Children by Angela Carter and having a wonderful time with it. I'm going to bed in a few minutes and I'm taking the book with me.

I don't know what genre it is, but it sure is English.

Good thing I have the counter for The Donor set for unique visiots instead of hits -- I keep going back to look at it.

Good thing I'm not trying to make a living off the story -- I have 63 so far (subtracting one for me), which is prety pale considering John Scalzi's numbers for Old Man's War. I don't know how long it took him to break into the order of magnitude.

I've written a couple hundred words on Afterwar today, actually moving plot, and the section is 18355 words as of the last sentence, which is close to what it ought to be at this point, and the end is near, but my dog it's painful. This is no rush to the conclusion with bells ringing and adrenaline rushing. I hope that's not an omen. I hope it's not as stale as it feels.

In any case, when it's done, I'll do something else.

On other fronts: Dil Dil Du Da is what I think is called "dowdling" in Ireland or is it Scotland? -- a vocal imitation of a bagpipe. It's wonderful and earwormy.

And it's dry farmed tomato season, which is even better than heirloom tomato season.

I slept in today. I have worked 109 hours in the last two weeks and I've had laryngitis for longer than that. I don't know if laryngitis is always the result of infection, or if it can be a functional thing. Anyway it seems to make me tired in a way. Talking is certainly a lot more effort than it ought to be, especially considering that a large part of my job is carrying on conversatrions with Gloria, conversatrions that can go on a very long time as she struggles to understand and be understood.

So I guess the good thing is that I have written a couple thousand words on Afterwar this week, and transcribed a thousand or so of The Donor. I also solved an incluing problem. Usually I like to have the internal evidence of the text itself establish the timeline for the reader but I was pretty sure that the chronology of Afterwar is too complicated for that, since the chapters are not presented in chronological order and there's a torrent of people and events and the grand march of history interacting with the small details of individual lives. So I have done a simple thing: I have given each chapter a subhead that places it in relative time. The first chapter is twenty-five years after the General Accords: the second chapter is twenty-five years before the General Accords. It makes me happy. I think I opriginally rejected this sort of thing, but I think that was before I munged the chronology as much as I have now.

THe Book of Gloria is starting to take shape. I am printing out pages with photographs mostly featuring Gloria doing things and going places, each labelled. I have written on some of the pages the names of objects she might be looking for, such as "pink sweater." Every day or so I print out two to five more pages. Each page is a coherent whole, and they're roughly prganized into pages about friends and family, pages about activities mostly around the house, pages about places to go, pages about things she might want or need, and pages about animals and flowers she might want to talk about.

The report on primary progressive aphasia is very big on simplifying: simplifying the space (throwing things out), simplifying activities, simplifying conversations. Good enough advice, but I get the impression that the level of simplifying they're thinking of is greater than Gloria needs, wants, or can benefit from. The examples of simplifying conversation that they give are the stupid dop-away-with clauses, conjunctions, and relational adjectives I sometimes see advocated as the way to make reading material easier for younger readers and English language learners. And that's stupid, because it makes the language unintelliglible, since it destroys the relationship between one item or action and the others. What I have been doing is limiting the number of pieces in a sentence -- two or three is fine, you can include the relationship words, making the sentence intelligible, without going on too long and losing her before she gets to the end. Something to bear in mind is that this is an intellectual, who taught high school English, followed current events and developments in science and the arts, wrote ironic poetry, and wrote essays in French. So, while she has lost a lot of language and some thinking tools that are dependent on language and is constantly struggling, usually somewhat confused, often overwhelmed, and sometimes exhausted, she's not stupid and she's not incapable of understanding things or drawing reasonable conclusions about things. She has a very soft, girlish-old-lady way of speaking, which makes it hard sometimes to realize that she's saying something intelligent behind all the word glitches. But I get to focus on her and I get to take the time to work out what she's trying to say, so I can usually get it. Or close to it, anyway.

So the kind of book that the report suggests is very minimal, with just common wants pictured so that the diminished old person can point to a banana or something and grunt "this! this!". If she lives long enough Gloria may be reduced to that. But I think in the immediate future she needs only a conversational prop and prompt, and that each picture can have more information than that. Or some of the pictures can anyway. The idea is not just to make her life easier and to make minimal communication possible, but to stimulate compensatory strategies by giving her what we used to call "scaffolding" in education. And to keep her talking -- "use it or lose it," they say, in other aging subjects.

Lately I've been wanting to talk to Oliver Sachs about it.

On other fronts, the nice fellow and three of his friends went up to the White Mountains and camped out just downslope from the bristlecone pines to watch the Perseid meteor shower. They first got to watch a lightning show for a few hours, and then they got the meteor shower. Rolfe told me about being up in the mountains when a meteor went past them and lit up the mountainside like a magnesium flare.

On still other fronts, my golden muscat grapes are almost ripe, and there's going to be too many of them, and I'm probably going to make raisins instead of wine (I might make wine, though)!