Peeking into the rock

The first picture is the nice fellow's dumbrella avatar. It used to be much higher quality. How can it degrade without being resaved and reformatted and stuff? It's been sitting there in that file for a long time. I guess he needs a new one.




The second is the small form of the graphic for "Bella and Chain."

I need to get back to that story. I know everything about it and that. Also I want to redo some small parts, mostly graphical ones.

Meanwhile, it looks like The Conduit is going to have fewer chapter breaks and be longer overall. Part of this is dealing with how certain tropes? event types? repeat: I'm trying to make it clearer that each time they repeat it's with greater immediate consequence to the interface. This means much less backflashing, I think. Also I have to cut out a certain kind of interior monologue and replace it with a certain other kind of internal monologue. Since it's no longer a first-person narration but tight-third with unavoidable tiny flashes of tight omni. By tight omni I mean that the narration knows more than the protagonist but doesn't leave his shoulder. So when somebody dies and the interface doesn't see it, but it's important to the story, the narration says so.

Since I'm trying to ratchet the danger up, I'm disturbed that the first encounter right now ends in death for the wisher. I think I want to go back and instead of having the guy die of aflatoxin poisoning, he should get messily ill from some other food poisoning. Just as the guy who remembers and therefore teaches the interface about memory doesn't die from the heart attack. This way the first deaths directly caused by the wishes come later in the book and I can preserve the guy in the welfare hotel as the first dead body the interface is in the company of.

It's a problem writing about a person whose intellectual and emotional development is not congruent to normal development. I could go different routes. I could say that because he had nothing like child nurturing he won't develop social characteristics and will be unable to care for others. But honestly, that personality is boring to me. I'm not out to prove anything about human nature. I know that sometimes people would write a story like this for that reason. I'm not. I always was interested in the perspective of the fox that gives wishes, the little man with the violin in another fairy story, the bronze head, the witch's familair, the sorcerer's Damned Boy, Faust's homunculus, the genie -- a sentient, self-aware granter of wishes who has no direct agency of its own. An actively passive character. That's it.

On another front, my boss and her husband were thanking me for being in no hurry to quit and I admitted I had no place to go and they said that another person was leaving and they'd just as soon fill that place and I said, fine, I'll stay, and we'll just have an understanding that in the long run, I would be leaving. Things are somewhat better now anyway, I don't know why. The morning staff is no longer ragging on me, anyway. They have other problems, I guess, and maybe they've finally figured out how much work they leave for me to do every day.

It's not like they can stop leaving that work for me. It's just the way it is. There's only so much labor and so much time and so much slack. And the babies cry more in the morning, and I don't know whether that's transition blues or the fact that neither of them will play and sing when things are rough. I have a special crying song -- it's "whimper and whine" from The Electric Company, originally meant to illustrate the silent E -- and the babies automatically stop crying, if only for a couple of minutes, when I sing it. I only sing it when somebody's really upset, and I sing it almost everytime there are two or more babies crying. I think that the babies take it as a signal that life isn't always going to be this tough, I don't know. But I am sure that telling a baby "you're fine" in a peremptory tone of voice is never very helpful, even when it's true.

Sometimes babies cry because of existential angst rather than a physical need, and sometimes when they do that they want to be held more than is reasonably possible or convenient for the grownups. But it's never that the feeling is not true and it's never that the need to be held is unreasonable in itself. The task for the grownups -- who have other things to do to make the place safe and healthy and pleasant for all the babies, and other babies to hold, change, feed, etc -- their task isn't to derogate the existential angst and touch-cravings of the crying babies, but to help them find other ways to acjieve comfort. And the human voice is one of our most proximate tools. Pleasant, reassuring patter, humor, chanting, singing, are all pretty effective most of the time (nothing is perfectly effective all the time). So a baby caregiver who is silent or talking just to the other adults is missing out on a really valuable toolbox, not just a tool.

And we don't have time to talk about this because we never have meetings away from the babies.

in spite of the fact that they didn't give me enough options. (for example, my correct answer for "roof" is "either, unpredictably)

So, due to issues of time zones and having an flist that takes several hours to read if I read it all (not that the flist has that many members, but its members are that prolific -- mostly the rss feeds from news organizations and I must admit I mostly only skim the headlines and it still takes forever), by the time I found Jo's Kentish Village game there were already 219 comments on it and I thought I better not (and I'm late already anyway but I don't want to go, which I will explain later when I come back).

So, I decided to name myself. I am not so much El Sobrante because I spent most of my childhood there but because it means "the leftover" because it was a corner between two Spanish land grants and I think that is cool. When I lived there, it was populated by factory workers and it had just been integrated by a Communist Party initiative (which is why we lived there). There was a bankrupt dairy farm across the street and a movie theater down on the San Pablo Dam Road (and a branch of Fry's, yes that Fry's, which was a grocery store chain at the time). On the roads leading up into the hills there were truck farms and a pig farm. If you went down the Dam Road a bit there were oil refineries. It was windy all winter and white-hot in the summer. Lots of grass fires. People tended to commute to Emeryville, Oakland, Richmond, Port Chicago to work, and the fire trucks came from Pinole. I think the police came from Richmond: the bookmobile certainly did. There was a lady down on the Dam Road who did ironing, and her house had a big horseshoe driveway and lots of prickly pears. If you walked up past Hillview School and kept going you'd be in Tilden Park right up behind the University of California.

Something El Sobrante has now that it didn't have when I was growing up is a sikh temple. There's an organization of El Sobrante Greens. Another thing it has is Save El Sobrante which appears to be an organization which wants to preserve the sprawly suburban character of the place? They don't want mixed-use, town-center type of development, but they do want development -- I think? It looks like they are opposed to land-use planning on principle. They have a bad link to some Santa Cruz right-wing thing.

What Spanish place name belongs to you?

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 103.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 2 sentences on your blog along with these instructions.
5. Don't you dare dig for that "cool" or "intellectual" book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest.
6. Tag five people. Or not, it's entirely up to you.

Two books, equidistant. One is Visions of Sugarplums, an old Christmas sweets cookbook. The other is The Failure of the Founding Fathers which I got to research the Constitutional Convention but I haven't been reading because it's not actually about that.

Maybe it would be a nice variation, instead of choosing, to get both the two books.

cookbook:

Add more flour if necessary. Knead dough on floured board until smooth and dshiny. (oddly, this is a recipe for springerle, which has emotional resonance for me because we had a springerle rolling pin when I was growing up).

other book:
opens up to a contemporary paragraph with no punctuation but dashes and I can't figure out how to count it so I'm considering it to be an illustration rather than text, and skipping it.

[Burr] recognized that the presidency had been transformed into a plebiscitary office, and that his active and public conniving would deeply compromise him if he succeeded in gaining the office in defiance of "the Wishes and expectations" of the American people. In contrast, if the House gave him the gift of the presidency while he sat passively in Albany, he might more readily weather the initial storm of public outrage and redeem himself by his conduct in office.

Maybe I should read this book, but it only has two cites for "slavery" in the index, and one for "slave rebellion" in a footnote. I'm not getting rid of it: maybe the power politics in it will become interesting after I've done my real research.

From personhead filkerdave. He offers to write songs especially for the first five people who respond and ask for one. Somebody who requests one should consider strongly making a similar offer.

My offer: a short-short, just for you.